Richard Wagner | Tristan und Isolde / 2016

the sublime and the ridiculous

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Wagner Tristan und Isolde / Mariusz Trebliński (stage director), live HD broadcast from the New York Metropolitan Opera on October 8, 2016 / I attended with Howard Fox

 

The first HD streaming production of the new Metropolitan Opera season, Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is musically sublime, with outstanding performances by the great soprano Nina Stemme, Stuart Nelson (singing only his second Tristan), Ekaterina Gubanova as the intruding servant Brangäne, René Pape as King Marke, Evegeny Nikitin, singing the smaller role of Tristan’s loyal allay Kurwenal, and, perhaps most importantly, Simon Rattle conducting the Met’s great orchestra.

     Yet this version of Tristan und Isolde is often equally leaden and confusing through production director Mariusz Trebliński’s decision to set the opera on a war ship in Act One, and upon another ship and in that ship’s enormous lower-deck storeroom filled with large containers of what appear to be weapons all stamped with “Warning” in Act Two. The return to Tristan’s childhood home, where Kurwenal has set up like a hospital room, where other portions of the home, having undergone a fire years earlier, appear ready to collapse, is nearly inexplicable, particularly when Tristan retrieves his father’s military jacket from the floor of a nearly creosote leaden room.

      On top of this, set designer Boris Kudlička’s and projection designer Bartek Macias’ sets and projections sometimes clumsily recreated the story of the young Tristan’s loss of his mother (in child-birth) and father, along with the quite unexplained torching of their home and the woods around it, further making murky what is generally a fairly simple tale of love, consuming desire, death, and transfiguration.

     Certainly these various elements do keep our eyes quite busy during the opera’s many long, static passages; and certainly they help to make clear that part of Tristan’s determination to find love—first in his obedience of and service to the King of Cornwall and, later, in his love of Isolde—has a great deal to do with his being an orphan. The worlds of Tristan’s Brittany, Isolde’s Ireland, and Marke’s Cornwall, moreover, obviously are structures of military might achieved through violence—just the kind of world in which Wagner generally locates his operas. Everyone here is a loyal warrior or a traitor, with heroes being awarded and traitors (i.e, the other side) being destroyed.

       But these things are fairly obvious within the long narrative passages Tristan and Isolde recount throughout the opera, and hardly need be reasserted with such heavy-handed imagery and metaphorical projections.

       At moments, particularly the long, long love duet in Act II, the projections of clouds and spinning planets truly do give rise to the kind of splendiferous visions being experienced by the loving couple, particularly as Brangäne interrupts their “maddened” lovemaking with her beautiful off-stage song of warning—a moment, as Rattle himself described it, of near transcendence. But, for the most part, the maritime imagery and weapon’s room storage scenes seemed in opposition to the lovers’ Schopenhauerian ruminations about day/death and night/love. The fact that their verbal love play verges, itself, on gobbledygook is certainly reiterated by the drab surroundings of this production.

       And finally, the metaphorical ghosts of both Tristan’s child-self and his dead father, particularly in Act Three—although again much-needed visual elements while Tristan lies dying—created more murkiness than clarity. It’s apparent that Tristan is being visited by the ghosts of the past, but a child flashing the light of a cigarette-lighter into the dying man’s eyes seems nearly ludicrous—if not dangerous.

      As in all successful renditions of this great opera, moreover, any singer who credibly endures it is a wonder. Here, despite my cavils, this production, particularly given Rattle’s languid and highly nuanced musical direction, along with Stemme’s beautifully balanced and modulated singing and acting, will be recognized as one of the greatest of this opera’s performances.

      Finally, even if by slashing her wrists, Isolde doesn’t quite go “gently into that good night,” it allows her to represent her “Liebestod” as a gradual transformation of worlds through the gradual loss of blood, making Marke’s and Brangäne’s reentries, once again, simple intrusions on the inseparable lover’s lives.  In Tristan’s and Isolde’s love there is no room for others, not even room for living.

 

Los Angeles, October 9, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (October 2016).

Sebastian Hernandez | Hypanthium / 2019

the smell of the rose

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sebastian Hernandez Hypanthium / the performance I saw was at REDCAT (the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) on January 24, 2019 with Pablo Capra

 

Choreographer Sebastian Hernandez’s work Hypanthium (the word refers to the heart of the rose which contains the nectar) primarily represents a kind of sexual ménage à trois between three individuals whom she describes as “gender non-conforming people, femmes, trans people and women who continue to express who they truly are regardless of patriarchy’s prevalence and constant policing of our bodies.” And, in this sense, sexuality becomes fluidity in this dance as the three major figures (Hernandez and dancers Angel Acuña and Autumn Randolph circle around one another, at times appearing almost in the kind of arm to arm, head to head patterns of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.)

      This work does not embrace the standard rituals—although there are quite funny rifts of those rituals, including early on an invocation to the local god of music/performative reviewers from the Los Angeles Times, Mark Swed—these dancers are all transgressors of normative behavior, interlinking in deep sexual swoons, breaking apart and returning to one another again and again in a series sexual interlinkings, diving in and out and between their kisses, their crotches, and constant embraces with often quite acrobatic somersaults and rather impassioned headstands.

      The enthusiastic audience who filled the theater at REDCAT at the opening night performance openly cheered on their various voguing-like positions and their constant cross-overs of relationship.

      Inevitably, there are temporary breakups, a movement away of each from the other with a sense of consumerism in each of their purses. Yet, it’s all in good humor, as we soon discover that, like the water filled chandelier (designed by Hernandez) that hangs over their heads, their purses (by Maria Maea are not filled with dollars but with water itself, later leaking down from the hook from they hang them. The outlandish rocking chairs (designed by Rafa Esparza) may temporarily separate them, but their pouting movements upon the wooden artifacts soon betray their dissatisfaction with the positions, as they quickly move them aside to position their bodies into far more intimate interactions on the stage floor with green-and-yellow lit environments which weave them back into their intentional transference from a single or doublings into a kind of unholy trinity which, despite all of the cultural difficulties of their world, cannot be contained.

     The entire dances of Hypanthium are about fluidity, as the three dancers, dressed in red, black, and white, move in and out of, not only one another, but of identity. If you need to ask about the sexual identities of these figures—and I must admit, at moments, I did—then you are missing the point. These three are one, a large expression of simple sexuality that doesn’t fit into normative systems. Even the psychological injections of the lack of personal recognition do not work in this world. No scolding needed. These three are one. A rose, behind it is Bette Midler’s rendition in her performance of Janis Joplin of “The Rose,” from whence the nectar, “hypanthium” comes:

 

Some say love, it is a river

That drowns the tender reed
Some say love, it is a razor
That leaves your soul to bleed
Some say love, it is a hunger
An endless aching need
I say love, it is a flower
And you, its only seed
It's the heart, afraid of breaking

That never learns to dance
It's the dream, afraid of waking
That never takes the chance.

 

     If Midler’s song in perhaps too sentimental for the hard-edge songs to which these dancers perform, it is, ultimately, a viewpoint that resonates with Hernandez’s vision.

     At the end of the performance, my guest for the evening, Pablo Capra, suggested that he felt nervous about several of Hernandez’s moves, particularly in the early film sequence, where the dancer struts down in deep drag tresses and in high heels in the midst of traffic on one of the major bridges that lead to East Los Angles, even reclining momentarily on the parapet looking over the railroad tracks. Later in the performance, on the slick REDCAT stage, the dancer again takes to his high heels, slinking across the stage in what appears like clear danger.

     The fact is that Hernandez and his small company take so many chances in their dancing, you cannot, as the enthusiastic audience reinforced, but adore their commitment to love, of whatever kind it may be.

 

Los Angeles, January 25, 2019

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

 

 

Lou Harrison | Lou Harrison: Music of the Pacific / 2017

pacific music

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lou Harrison Lou Harrison: Music of the Pacific / Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/Cal Arts Center), performance I attended with Pablo Capra was on December 9, 2017

 

Those acquainted with the music of noted American composer Lou Harrison, will know that he was fascinated throughout his life with international music and instruments, and that he was interested in Asian music, particularly, after he worked with K. P. H. Notoprojo (also known as Pak Cokro), in the Javanese gamelan,

     Last week, I attended my first Harrison concert, which was made up of works both for Western instruments and, in the second half, his beloved gamelans, bells, percussion instruments, and inverted bowls. The concert began with what was described as “Chamber Music,” pieces for French horn, trumpet, percussion, harp, and mandolin such as Clay’s Quintet (performed by Erin Poulin, Nicolas Bejarano, Jonathan Hepfer, Leila Bishop and Sean Hayward); a Varied Trio with violin, piano, and percussion (Nigel Deane, Vera Weber, and Katie Eikam); and Serenade for Guitar and Percussion (John Schneider and T. J. Troy). These works from 1978 and 1987, represent an earlier decade of his work when, after studying with both Arnold Schoenberg at UCLA and Charles Ruggles, he composed his microtomical works.

    But it was the second half of the concert when a much larger contingent of performers that revealed the composer’s larger fascination with combining more Western-based instrumentation (soprano saxophone, cello, and violin) with the traditional Asian instrumentation. Each of the four later pieces—Philemon and Baukis (from 1992), Cornish Lancaran (1986), Basonto (1966, composed with Notoprojo), and Double Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Javanese Gamelan (1981-82)—were wonderful revelations.       

      Having myself played baritone saxophone in high school, I was intrigued by the German composer Ulrich Krieger’s wonderful playing of the soprano saxophone, as well as the choral chants of the members of the California Institute of Arts Contemporary Vocal Ensemble. But the true masterwork of this concert was the final, full-out combination of Western music traditions and the Asian instrumentation. Just to watch the vast group of performers rushing back and forth to share the percussional gongs, bowls, drums, and Javanese Gamelans, all combined with the cello playing of Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick and violin contributions of Andrew McIntosh was a musical enchantment that’s very difficult to describe in words. The highly rhythmic patterns of the ancient world melds with Western classicism in a way that truly does describe the concert’s subtitle “Music of the Pacific.”

     While waiting in line to enter the Redcat theater, I spoke to the red-haired woman in front of me, who told me that she and husband had just driven in from the fire-plagued Ventura to attend the concert; her son—who I believe must be multi-talented long-haired Sean Hayward—she explained had gone to Indonesia to study the Gamelon. They should indeed be proud.

     This year, the 100th anniversary of Harrison’s birth, has been celebrated throughout the Los Angeles area, with a concert in Pasadena’s Boston Court of his interludes, his opera Young Caesar performed in June at Walt Disney Concert Hall, and other concerts in Santa Cruz, and Joshua Tree, where Harrison spent many of the last years of his life. I now wish I’d been able attend these other concerts as well, but feel blessed to have attended this Redcat performance.

 

Los Angeles, December 17, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (December 2017).

Bernard-Marie Koltès | In the Solitude of Cotton Fields / 2010

men in the streets

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bernard-Marie Koltès (original text), Radosław Rychcik (director) In the Solitude of Cotton Fields / performed by The Stefan Zeromski Theatre, with music by the Natural Born Chillers / performed in Polish, with English subtitles / the performance I saw was on September 24, 2010 at Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalAts Theater in the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles)

 

Based on the 1986 play Dans la Solitude des Champs de Coton by French author Bernard-Marie Koltès, who died of AIDS in 1989, In the Solitude of Cotton Fields is an angst-ridden play about gay love and sex. The two performers of this Polish production, Wojciech Niemczyk and Tomasz Nosinski, backed up by the neo-punk techno band, Natural Born Chillers, begin the action with a mesmerizing dance performance. Dressed in retro 1960s black suits, thin ties, and white shirts, the two stunningly gyrate to the music, Niemczyk moving in all-out abandonment, while Nosinski—already suggesting the character we soon encounter—dances in a series of more restrained, nervous twitches that suggest an internalized psychological condition that won't permit him to "let loose." Both men are absolutely beautiful, completely aware of their lithe bodies and their youthful good looks. When they meet on the street after the dance, a gaze between the two sends them into a sexual interchange negotiated with an intense dialogue, as they play out the roles they describe as dealer and client.

     Niemczyk, self-assured and insistent that he—a figure that haunts the dark world of the nighttime beasts—is a man who can discern what anyone is seeking, and deliver. While Nosinski, covering any lust he may have with hauteur, claims he is a man of the light, never seeking out the dark; he, so he says, walks "straight," moving with the society as opposed to against it. The insistence of the one that sex is the territory of the hunted and haunted, and the other's apparent fear of involvement is the substance of the poetically-filled dialogues in which they engage, cautiously moving toward each other as they verbally struggle, a psychodrama, in part, about sexual self-acceptance.

     Of course, one might immediately (as do I) wonder why a normal sexual encounter of two gays on the street should result in these strange metaphors of Marxist politics, underlined by Sadeian issues of pain and pleasure. Koltès clearly saw sex as a battle between forces and lived with a far greater sense of being an outsider than I, who joyfully encountered dozens of young men in my youth in just the manner these two do.

     To be fair, however, it is not just sex that the author and characters explore, but the whole issue of what through sex they are seeking, the desire that Niemczyk claims he can fulfill and Nosinski is so ready to deny. The sensuality of both their positions is what makes this work so fascinating—and frustrating—as Niemczyk waits for the first drool of the mouth before pouncing and Nosinski struggles to bottle his sexual excitement and terror within his body. And what is marvelous despite  Koltès' slightly empty and rather abstract thematic is the brilliant performances these two actors give. Unlike the American acting tradition where the body is made to parallel "natural action," the performances here propel mouths, faces, eyes, lips, hips, legs, and feet into constant motion, often revealing in their movements what words cannot express. One of the most explosive moments in the work occurs when, having painted his lips bright red, Niemczyk falls into a wailing scream that serves as a kind of siren song, a plea for love that no one can ignore, a music far more compelling than a written score.

      Nosinski's thin frame seems controlled by wires more than nerves and blood vessels. The fear and horror he expresses in his every move explains, in part, his absolute subservience to the more openly sexual being. At the moment when we feel he cannot survive without release, he slowly strips away his coat, shirt, pants, socks, shoes, and underwear to stand passively naked before his dealer.

      Redressing, the men stand apart while a video collage of famous and unknown sexual encounters from movies, advertisements, and other sources is shown. I found this, mostly pictures of over-the-top sexuality, the least satisfying moment of the work. But when it ends with both mens' lips smeared in red, the three quick moments of their coming together have been almost electric, a different kind of dance that reminded me, in part, of Robert Longo's homoerotic friezes of his 1981 performance piece, Empire (see My Year 2005); the characters themselves recalled Longo's male figures of Men in the Cities. I don't know how these actors were dressed in Koltès original play, but it would not surprise me if Longo, who himself was influenced by filmmakers such as Fassbinder, had been a source.

     As the two men finally consummate their sexual act, it is still unclear whether or not they have fulfilled their desires. But for a least a few moments they have released the tensions between them, turning philosophical positions into softer, human acts, like sleeping in a field of cotton—although given the American history of such fields, that may involve an even more debilitating negotiation.

                                   

Los Angeles, September 27, 2010

Reprinted from USTheater (September 2010).

Anonymous | The Festival Play of Daniel / 2010

the writing on the wall

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anonymous The Festival Play of Daniel, James Conlon, conductor, Eli Villaneuva, director / performed by singers of the LA Opera, with members of the LA Opera orchestra, Hamilton High School Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra, The Colbun String Orchestra, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels Choir, the Colburn Children's Choir and Opera Workshop, the Pueri Cantores San Gabriel Valley Children's Choir, the St. John Eudes Children's and Adult Choirs / at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels, Saturday, February 27, 2010

 The Old Testament Book of Daniel—which Howard and I reread before our attendance at the Medieval festival play based on it—is certainly one of the strangest books of the Bible. Although it contains three of the most famous stories of biblical literature—the burning and resurrection of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, Belshazzar's inability to read the writing on the wall, and Daniel's imprisonment in the lion's den—much of the story is a revelation-like maze of dreams, foretellings, and detailed interpretations of those dreams.

     Daniel, a slave in the court of Nebuchadnezzar, quickly rises in the court when he is able to interpret Nebuchadnezzar's dream, even though the dream forebodes the end of his realm. 

    Similarly, he interprets the writing on the wall for Nebuchadnezzar's son Belshazzar, again predicting the fall of the empire, but is praised nonetheless for his ability.

     The Persian Darius who next rules admires Daniel from the beginning, but is tricked by his advisors into commanding all men to bow before his image. When Daniel prays instead to his God, Darius has no choice but to arrest him and send him into certain death in the lion's den. When he opens the den the next morning to find Daniel has survived, he seemingly converts:

 

                         I make a decree, That in every dominion of my kingdom

                         men tremble and fear before the God of Daniel; for he is

                         the living God, and steadfast for ever, and his kingdom that

                         which shall not be destroyed, and his dominion shall be even 

                          unto the end.

 

     But these are the least complex of the that book's events. Much more perplex are the interweaving of dreams and tales, some told directly by Daniel, others by the kings. The texts quickly shift in form and content, one dream standing out almost as a surreal series of images that might be at home in any contemporary, animated science fiction flick.

     At one point Daniel is visited by God or, perhaps, an angel, where he is told of a series of predictions that call to mind the New Testament Book of Revelations, ending in a vision of a figure similar to Christ. Even more strangely, after the vision occurs Daniel is ordered to "shut up the words and seal the book." In short, the prophet has been told to cease prophesying at the very moment of his greatest revelation.

     The Christian-based Festival Play of Daniel concentrates its energy on Belshazzar, the inexplicable writing on the wall, Daniel's incarceration by Darius in the lion's den, and the prediction—much more emphatically stated than in the Bible—of the coming of Christ.

     The production I saw was clearly revised and "filled in" with full choruses and orchestras, vast dances and a request for the audience to share in singing the closing song.

     The Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels was filled with people of great racial and financial diversity (tickets were free), along with numerous children which were highly entertained by the long processions through the aisles of kings (Belshazzar, likeably played by Yohan Yi, and Darius by Robert MacNeil), queens (Danielle Walker), and an angel upon stilts (Caleb Barnes). The lions, for my taste, were too reminiscent of The Lion King, but obviously delighted the children in our midst.

       I might wish to see this grand spectacle in a production performed closer to the original and directed more in the spirit of emblematic tableaux rather than with such dramatic flourish. Conlon's and Villanueva's production clearly served its purposes, bringing spiritual enlightenment to the audience through more musically flowing and dramatically narrative passages. Admittedly, at production's end, I wiped away the tears. While the last phrase of the music (sung by audience and players) admitted that in God "we own the mystery," however, the many mysteries of Daniel were somehow painted over by this modernized recreation, and we left more in simple pleasure than in wonderment.

 

Los Angeles, March 10, 2010

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (March 2010) and USTheater, Opera, and Performance (2010).

 

Samuel Beckett | Act Without Words II, Come and Go, Catastrophe, Footfalls, and Krapp’s Last Tape (Beckett5) / 2017

little catastrophes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samuel Beckett Act Without Words II, Come and Go, Catastrophe, Footfalls, and Krapp’s Last Tape (Beckett5) / Los Angeles, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, Sunday, January 29, 2017 / I attended the production with Pablo Capra and Paul Sand

 

The other day, upon the news of British actor John Hurt’s death, I told my occasional theater-going friend, Pablo Capra, that I had already seen two of Hurt’s performances of the great Beckett play, Krapp’s Last Tape, one in a film version of the Beckett on Film series by Atom Egoyan and a second time, live at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, California—both of which I had reviewed.

      The very next day, we were planning to attend another local production of five short Beckett plays, including Krapp’s Last Tape, at Los Angeles’ Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, and he questioned me why might I want to see it again. I told him that, well, one simply could not get enough of Beckett, and that, even though I’d thought Hurt’s performance the highest pinnacle of that work, I’d probably be going back to Beckett plays, of every sort, for the rest of my life.

      I still feel this, despite the fact that the Odyssey production of some of Beckett’s short plays, including Act Without Words II, Come and Go, Catastrophe, Footfalls, and, yes again, Krapp’s Last Tape was rather a mixed bag.

      Let me begin by commending all of the actor’s and the theater’s abilities and enthusiasm in reviving these wonderful plays. That is, in fact, what brings me to the marvelous Odyssey many times. Their mix of classic plays and new theater works is one of the reasons why the Los Angeles theater scene is so very vibrant and unpredictable, and which allows me to see good and even excellent theater without always having to trot off to New York or to other cities.

      But Beckett is difficult. First, he is so extraordinarily particularized. What you might describe as his scenarios for theater, especially—despite their seeming abstractness—demanding a kind of preciseness of sets, costumes, and actions that might only be compared to the American playwright Eugene O’Neill, who details his directions endlessly. Indeed, often there are more theatrical instructions to Beckett’s works than actual words.

      The other difficulty about Beckett’s plays is that, although they are often about impossibly lost and frustrated souls, his figures are also clowns, fools, and even idiots who demand that his characters not be played with deep dramatic gestures. The very abstractness, for example, of Act Without Words II, in which two are buried in bags, each, one by one, poked into life, is a challenge to any actor who desires to create a character. In this production, Alan Abelew and Beth Hogan, each podded by Norbert Weisser into temporary being, met with varying success.

     Abelew presented his figure as a kind of tragic sad-sack, a bit like Nagg in Beckett’s Endgame, dramatizing the character in a way that, alas, made him more a existentially troubled figure rather than a merely morose one. Hogan, as the kind of happy-to-be-alive-again reincarnation, was much more successful—but that just may have to do with the fact that she is a more outsized and joyful figure.

      I think director Enda Hughes got this short work more precisely in his narrowly framed film with Marcello Magni and Pat Kinenave, which I saw after on the internet, where the characters, moving with a kind of silent-film jitteriness, came to life in more a Butser Keatonesque manner than Abelew’s and director Ron Sossi’s exaggerated counter-hero.   

      Far more successful was Come and Go, a play originally dedicated to my acquaintance, the British publisher John Calder, with—in this production—the three actresses, Diana Cignoni, Sheelagh Culler, and, again, Hogan, who, a bit more sparkly dressed (particularly given their shoes, designed by Audrey Eisner), seemed to have retained some of their charming youth, which had once connected them in their early school days, despite their now gossip-mongering whispers (never heard by the audience) about what appear to be unknown failures in their life and their current marriages. I far preferred it, in fact, to the John Crow film, with the more dowdily dressed Paoli Dionisotti, Anna Massey, and Sian Phillips. For this play, Beckett even provided a drawing of how, at the end, the characters need to entwine their hands in a symbolic Celtic knot, demonstrating just how specific the playwright was with regard to the way he wanted his works to be performed.

      Catastrophe, also starring Abelew, Hogan, and Weisser was also pretty loyal to Beckett’s instructions. This play, often described as one of the playwright’s most political works—and originally dedicated to the imprisoned Czech playwright and later President,  Václav Havel—is even, in part, about how the playwright’s intentions are too often distorted by the directors. Here, a living emblem of sorts, a kind of figure that appears might be right out of the Holocaust, is used as the subject of a soon-to-be-performed work in which the Director’s Assistant is equally subjected to absurd instructions of how to dress and undress, to whiten and light a living human being, as if he were simply a prop. Here Abelew, with graceful agility, lifts his head in a kind of final triumph against the directorial dogmatism, demonstrating a subtle revolutionary expression that denigrates the “catastrophe” (in this meaning, “an act of defiance”) in which he finds himself. And again, this short playlet seemed far preferable to David Mamet’s transformed rendition in his Beckett of Film version—even though it’s hard to imagine his better cast than Harold Pinter as the Director and John Gielgud (in his final performance) as the living statue.

     Diana Cigoni performed remarkably well in Footfalls, a play about a young daughter ritualistically pacing outside her dying mother’s door. But frankly, this 1975 play is simply not one of my favorite Beckett works. Perhaps it’s simply the metronomic structure of the play, the nine steps forward and the nine creaks back that make it seem, quite literally, a kind of creaking monologue, even though the “never have done” pattern and the endless dying “viduity” of the mother has a great deal in common with the author’s Krapp’s Last Tape. Yes, it’s a musical work, and the patterns of language he uses here are often quite beautiful, but, in the end, it all seems somehow much to do about nothing. The woman, like Krapp, simply might have made more of her life out playing lacrosse, her childhood sport.

       During the intermission I discussed these plays with my other theater-going companion of the evening, improvisatory comedian Paul Sand, and we both agreed that, despite the noble intentions of these productions and, my recognition of the remarkable directorial work of Sossi (I’ve now seen dozens of his productions) that Beckett was simply better with a lighter hand. And, as I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, I had seen John Hurt do Krapp twice.

     I truly admire the acting of Norbert Weisser, having seen him in my friend John O’Keefe’s Nazi-period play, Times Like These. And, given the difficulties of the work, I admire him for attempting the nearly impossible Beckett monologue, indeed a brave undertaking.

      But Krapp, unlike Weisser’s interpretation, is not a failed lover angry with his past, but is, like so many of Beckett’s figures, an absolute fool, a man who could only bother to gather up his love for a single night’s pleasure.  And as beautiful as that one night may have been, he is not a conventional hero, but an absolute idiot, another clown whom Beckett even forces, temporarily, to fall upon a banana peel—the banana being, apparently, his favorite and perhaps only—other than his endless draughts of whiskey—sustenance. 

     Krapp, like his name, is not a secret Marlon Brando: no brutal beauty like Stanley Kowalski or even a “former contender” such as Terry Malloy of On the Waterfront, so there’s no way to act from your heart as if you were a student of Method Acting. Krapp is a figure of his own imagination, of his memory; and playing him requires a very precise precision: open a drawer, pile up the “spools,” eat a banana, and listen, respond, drink, and listen. Impulsive anger, fits of sentimentality are pointless in his world. He has already died before the play has begun.

      All of this is not to say that I do not commend these actors and their valiant performances. And I truly recommend everyone run to seem them. As I’ve already stated, Beckett requires constant viewing. If I had no other plays, movies, operas, and dances to attend to in the next few weeks (as, somewhat regretfully, I do) I’d return without reservation.

 

Los Angeles, January 30, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2017)