Henrik Ibsen | Ghosts / 2022

zombies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Henrik Ibsen Ghosts, adapted by Richard Eyre / directed by Bart DeLorenzo, Los Angeles, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble / the performance I attended was on September 18, 2022

As director Bart DeLorenzo writes in his short introduction to the program for the current production of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, now running through October 23rd at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble:

“I feel that 2022 is a kind of ‘after’ moment. Like we’re crawling out of the wreckage and we can finally look around at all the damaged, collapsed structures that have never supported what we want out of our world. And we can maybe see more clearly how we’re continuing to hurt each other and how we might progress. Like Oswald in the play, we’re asking the past, ”What kind of life have you given me? And as we rethink and remake our world, maybe we can begin differently.”

     To me, at least, appears that these days we are only digging in deeper into our own ghosts, haunting our own horrible pasts. The central subjects of Ibsen’s 1881 play read like headline banners of our tabloids and our entertainment news stations—as translator Richard Eyre reiterates them: the problems and effects of patriarchy and class distinctions, free love, prostitution, religious hypocrisy, heredity, incest, and euthanasia.

     These obviously, were subjects that got Ibsen’s play Gengangere rejected for production by nearly all Scandinavian theaters—the play had its premier with a Danish touring group in Chicago in 1882—performed finally in Norway in 1883. Even the King of Sweden told Ibsen that it was not a good play. It was banned in England, just as today books with far lesser controversial subjects are being banned from libraries and schools all over the US.

     But even more disturbing than his outre subjects, perhaps, was his play’s unmitigated attack on bourgeois social and religious values, values still held by millions throughout the world and certainly in our country in this time of the rising pressures of conservative thought. Reverend Manders (here played by Barry Del Sherman) condemns nearly everything with which he comes in contact in the home of Helene Alving (Pamela J. Gray), from the books on social economics and women’s independence, to the way Helene has raised—or perhaps we should say, “not cared properly”—for her son, Oswald (Alex Barlas), having sent him away early to live in Paris to remove from the evils of her own home.

      Manders dismisses the books even if he has never read them, and equally mocks the free lives of the Bohemian artists with whom Oswald has been living, without apparently having been to Paris. Oswald angrily defends the open relationships of his Parisian friends suggesting that they live more loving relationships with their unmarried women and bastard children than almost anyone he knows in the provincial Norwegian world from which he has come. And his mother argues that his views are no different from her own, an even more amazing revelation for the pastor who is about to spend a day and long night being shocked by the truths that are paraded before him.

       No sooner has he finished his flustered conversation with Oswald than he brings up Helene Alving’s own past, which began soon after her marriage to the so-called “Captain” when she attempted to leave him, visiting her then youthful friend Manders, a young seminary student at the time whom she believed she loved him, to confess how her arranged marriage to Alving was simply untenable given his notorious drunkenness and womanizing.

       Manders is proud to have refused temptation having sent her back to her husband, convinced now that she is about to dedicate a newly built orphanage on her own land in memory of her husband, that it’s all been for the best.

       But Ibsen takes the opportunity, the long day before that dedicational ceremony, to allow Helene to catch him up on the facts, since he has dared not visit her since her “disgraceful” attempt to escape the marriage. In fact, so Helene reveals, the marriage did not improve, but merely worsened, Alving’s drunkenness and personal abuse of her increasing. Even his affairs grew more licentious as he nightly bedded her own maid, Johanna, who bore his daughter, the current maid of Helene’s household, Regina Engstrand (Viva Hassis Gentes). That fact even further inculpates Manders who, through Jacob Engstrand’s (J. Stephen Brantley) lies—he who is currently the head carpenter of the orphanage—has confirmed by his own signature Regina into the church registry as Jacob’s legal daughter.

      Helene further reveals that it was not her husband who developed their land, making them rich, but she herself who usurped the duties he had abandoned, through intelligence and fortitude developing her farmstead into a source of income so that she can now spend precisely what was left of her husband’s estate on the false memorial of the orphanage, while leaving her own monies to her son at her death.

      In short order, in other words, Helene reveals the mendacity, hypocrisy, and utter stupidity of men like Manders of her community, who advises her not even to take out an insurance policy on the new building because people might gossip about his own lack of faith in God to protect it. How Helene ever imagined that she once loved Manders, who even she describes as a “baby,” is one of the many mysteries of this play.

      Once Ibsen has established his feminist heroine, one might have thought he could rest in his dramatic revelation of the mean and narrow-thinking patriarchal societies of provincial Norway. But the playwright does not at all rest on his abilities to demonstrate the rotten foundations of the lives of wives and children such as Helene and Oswald, but turns the table, so to speak, to show us even more startlingly how a strong-willed woman like Helene and even a free-thinker like Oswald are both facilitators and victims of such closed-off worlds.

       Indeed, it is Ibsen’s remarkable analyses of how hurt and revengeful women such as Helene help create the worlds in which men like her husband attempt to escape, and how both of them working together help to pass on their own dreadful failures to their children that transform this play into statement of global indignation. In this case, as nearly anyone who has even heard of this play knows, passing on deadly syphilis to Oswald, forced his visit not because he necessarily wanted to return to the barren and utterly boring wilds of small town in Norway but because of what the doctor has described as “the softening of his brain.”

      Ghosts are truly everywhere in Helene Alving’s house, the ghosts of her own loves and those she has not permitted. But even that word “ghosts,” which Ibsen himself found as an unsuitable translation of “gengangere” which, as Eyre points out, literally means “a thing that walks again,” is far too romantic to convey the horror that both wife and son discover within themselves. Perhaps we should use the word “zombie,” that suddenly popular demon of our own time, to describe the specters of this work which are not afraid to devour the bodies of their own flesh and kind.

       Even Oswald must eventually admit that he is repeating his father’s life with his temporary escape in alcohol and races around the table with Regina, although at least he recognizes that only she might be strong enough to finally, when things get really bad, to jab the syringe of morphine into his veins (in this play version, alas, the morphine comes in pills, which in fact is easier to swallow by oneself than by the force of another as we witness in the last scene). What Frau Alving and even Ibsen won’t admit is that her son’s syphilis could not be inherited from Oswald’s father except through a sore in her vaginal channel upon his conception—unless it was immaculate.

        If nothing else, the horror tale that Ibsen tells is not in the least possible of being described as that most despised condition that both Oswald and his mother can imagine: boredom. If anyone who carefully watches the spiraling revelations of this work were to describe it to me as boring, I’d sentence them to engage with the endless jabber of fabrications of QAnon for the rest of eternity. For Ibsen’s play, as he and others now for almost a century have come to recognize, is sadly based solely on the dreadful truths of our often shabby lies and lives.

      The trio of actors, Gray, Sherman, and Barlas, do a credible job of re-creating Ibsen’s house of horrors despite the fact that, at times, Richard Eyre’s somewhat rambunctious updating of the former staid British translations and his own devouring of a great deal of the poetry of the original. 

     For the most part scenic designer Frederica Nascimento did a decent job of condensing three separate rooms, living room, dining room, and bedroom onto one stage. But I cannot imagine what a series of boxes full of a jumble of objects spread out upon apron of the set might signify. I suspect it is meant to represent Captain Alving’s old mementos packed up and perhaps ready to be sent off to the orphanage when it opens. Clearly, it is meant to represent further aspects of the ghostly presences that surround Helene and her son. But it still creates almost a confusing blockade between the actors and the audience, the closeness of which is one of the delights of the Odyssey stages.

      And finally, do we really need an upside down hanging symbol of the orphanage building ready to come crashing down when it all catches on fire and is ready to be destroyed—without insurance of course? To me it merely served as yet another scenic intrusion to an already very busy set and series of actions as they fight the fire return and leave the house.

      But these are minor cavils in what otherwise was a most commendable production of play that seems suddenly very necessary, as DeLorenzo hints, for our own time.

 

Los Angeles, September 19, 2022

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 2022).

Richard Wagner | Das Rheingold || Die Walküre || Siegfried || Götterdämmerung / 2010

consummation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Wagner Das Rheingold / LAOpera, performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles (the production we saw was on June 18, 2010)

 

Richard Wagner Die Walküre / LAOpera, performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles (the production we saw was on June 20, 2010)

 

Richard Wagner Siegfried / LAOpera, performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles (the production we saw was on June 23, 2010)

 

Richard Wagner Götterdämmerung / LAOpera, performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles (the production we saw was on June 26, 2010)

 

Over several afternoons and nights from June 18th to June 26, 2010, Howard and I attended the entire 16 hours of Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Los Angeles Opera.

    Much has been written about Wagner's overwhelmingly brilliant, often mocked, and sometimes hated achievement, and I do not care here to wade into the complex stories, myths, and psychological sloughs surrounding the work. The Ring, no matter what is thrown at it, is quite simply a marvelous human accomplishment, never quite matched in the all the years since its creation. Its mess of a plot, sometimes ridiculous characters, and forests of inexplicable riddles does not, somehow, diminish this work, and I think anyone—saintly or evil—who loves theater, music, and spectacle cannot help but admit to admiring it.

     What I would like briefly to focus on, instead, involves another kind of quagmire of sorts regarding the extravagant costumes and sets by the notable designer-directors, Archim and Amanda Freyer and the musical direction by the much beloved Los Angeles Opera conductor, James Conlon.

     Nothing I might write in connection with these issues is easy. For I highly admire the decision, which was strongly argued for, I have heard, by Conlon and General Director Plácido Domingo, to attempt this production. I also applaud their goal of bringing a completely new look and feeling to the great opera. That the company was almost destroyed in the process of bringing Wagner's four operas to the stage brings more blame, perhaps, on today's audiences and the high cost of such an undertaking than any misjudgment by the producers. It was and remains a noble act to present this work in a city always hungry for art, theater, and music, but not always appreciative of the particular manifestations of such.

     Yet all that said, there are some important questions to be brought up regarding this version.I swore to myself not use any variation of Dickens' tired antithesis to describe my feelings about the LA Opera's Ring, but it continues to summarize them: "It was the best of operas, it was the worst of operas."

      The first evening began swimmingly enough with the Rhine Maidens dressed in the billowing robes of water which is their home. The Freyers' highly raked stage worked nicely to create a sense of the swelling water, undulating in time to their joyful teasing of the ridiculous Alberich, dressed in this production, as a masked troll. The combination of the grotesque and whimsy in Alberich and the Niebelungs later nicely fit a world where they are entrapped in the process of refining gold.

     But already in the scene in Valhalla, we begin to become somewhat distracted by the costumes. Fricka's constantly outreaching hands may indicate her major activity of pleading with her husband Wotan, but to keep her character locked away in this position seems to allow no subtlety. She is, after all, not always pleading, but righteously correct her assessment of Wotan's own laws. The powerful giant brothers, Fasolt and Fafner, seem inexplicably to be alternating between dwarves and the incredibly tall construction workers by which the work defines them.

     Wotan, his head locked in a square-boxed helmet with his facial image reflected upon it, stole much of sense of power by which he is defined. Of course, he is a conflicted image, a God who is tempted, again and again, away from obeying the laws he has himself established. And there is no question that Freyer's costume implies this tension between his mind and apparition. At certain times, particularly when he stood at the top of the stage, however, the audience could hardly hear Wotan's (Vitalij Kowaljow) declarations, let alone tremble at the vocal power of his angry proclamations. At other times, Fricka (Michelle DeYoung) seemed somewhat distraught in her permanently outstretched position. Only Alberich (Richard Paul Fink) and Mime (Graham Clark) seemed comfortable in their dress.

      By the time of Die Walküre—easily the most brilliant of the LA Opera productions—the problems of direction, costume, and set became more obvious. In some ways, Freyer's attempts to create his own series of private leitmotifs, helped the audience—particularly those who had never before encountered the complex series of characters Wagner presents—recognize and define them. But by so thoroughly defining them, he also took away most of their "humanity," stripping them of any empathy we might feel for their human-like achievements and failures and leaving them afloat in a mythological world that separated them from us. A student of Brecht, it is clear that that was, in part, what Freyer was seeking. But in a work such as The Ring, which has already built into it a sense of separation from our daily experiences, the actors and director must work even harder, in some ways, to make us feel that these figures resemble ourselves.

     James Conlon is a dedicated and highly committed director. And his lectures before each the four operas were filled with beautiful descriptions of how Wagner's music brought us into the action both emotionally and intellectually. In my encounters with this director, however, it appears that he prefers sublimity over the barbarous. He is not the kind of director, I feel, to do justice to Stravinsky or Berg. And here, although he described the dreadful power of certain of Wagner's refrains, we seldom heard them. The music (perhaps in part because of the near-burial of the orchestra beneath the stage) was often beautiful, but seldom intense, let alone earth-shattering.

      Linda Watson sang and performed marvelously as Brünnhilde, but the constant dressing and undressing of her, as Siegfried later rips her gown away patch by patch, was more a distraction that an amplification of any substantive meaning, visual or otherwise. By the time we had reached Siegfried we had lost touch with this world, strangely at the very moment when we encounter the most human character of the entire masterpiece. Like LA Times music critic Charles McNulty I suddenly felt I had entered a California amusement park instead of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Admittedly Siegfried is a kind of bumbling idiot, a true innocent whose only major attribute lies in his powerful muscles. But to portray him simply as a kind of blond-headed Michelin Man is to destroy any possibility of human redemption. And that is ironically, why Wagner vested so much power in this figure. In his innocence, he even seeks fear, without comprehending what might lie behind it. In the course of the work, Siegfried discovers love, treachery, hate, and even death. He is of a new race, and as such, to close him off as a laughable stereotype does a terrible injustice to the entire work.

      For all that, the costumes and sets, even the ridiculous tilt of the stage, did create some memorable moments: among them the nightmarish underground world of the Niebelungs and the great battles (achieved through dozens of colored light sticks) of Götterämmerung. Perhaps I had simply grown more used to Freyer's methods by the last long work, but it seemed to me that the positioned costumes into and out which Gunther and Gutrune stepped well-fitted the mold of these opportunists. The orchestra itself, moreover, seemed to come alive and, still without the shattering thrill of sound one hopes for in Siegfried's death—a death which, as our opera-loving friend Bob Orr, in his deep Alabama accent, described it, "signifies the end of the whole Teutonic universe"—performed ably and even memorably. The audience, many of whom had never before seen a Wagner opera, was clearly thrilled. Despite my stated doubts, I too applauded joyfully with tearful eyes.

     This is clearly a production that should be seen again.

 

Los Angeles, August 19, 2010

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (August 2010).

Len Jenkin | Dark Ride / 1996

heart of darkness

by Douglas Messerli

 

Len Jenkin Dark Ride / New York, Soho Rep, November 13, 1981 / the production I saw was a revival of the play at the Soho Rep in early 1996

 

Although I originally published this play in 1993, saw a production of it in 1996, and have read it a couple of times since, I still find it difficult to describe the effect of the masterwork. Like its title, it is a theatrical-like “ride” through the slightly crazed minds of its characters: a Translator who is unsure of every version he attempts of a Chinese work titled The Book of the Yellow Ancestor; a young woman, Margo, whose boyfriend has suddenly gone missing; an insane occultist, Mr. Zendavesta. who has hired the translator; a slightly perverse Jeweler, Ravensburg; a Thief, the missing boyfriend of Margo, who has stolen diamonds from the Jeweler; a freelance General; and various other figures such as a Waitress, the owners of a small café and creators of various carnival rides, Ed and Edna, and the strange Mrs. Lammle (wife of Carl Lammle, which—although is spelled differently—calls up the pioneer of American filmmaking), who appears to have come out of a different play!

     In the Soho Rep revival which I witnessed, the audience, if I remember correctly, was seated in the center of a vast, slightly raised diorama, upon which the various scenes of the play took place. At first, these characters and their stories appear to be unrelated. The Translator tells of the impossibility of working with his text; Margo sits in a room reading, watching television, and listening to music where, oddly, the Jewler, Ravensburg, talks to her; the Thief enters a café, the Embers, where he encounters the Waitress and the cook, Deep Sea Ed; the General explains a series of nonexistent encounters where each side attempts to trick the other, arguing that “the more likely an opponent’s action seems the less likely it becomes.” Yet from the beginning Jenkin encourages us to perceive mysterious links, most often by beginning with words or actions similar to those with which the previous scene has just ended.

     Soon these interlinkings grow more complex as unlikely figures encounter each other and often seem to know incidents of their life. By the end of the play, in fact, the playwright has whipped up a strange story with a bizarre logic. Ravensburg’s jewels have been stolen by the Thief, and the jeweler appears to be working with the General to track them down by luring the Thief to an occultist’s convention, headed by Zendavesta, in Mexico. Margo is kidnapped to serve as bait, and Edna invited down to perform.

    Throughout, the characters speak of “coincidence,” which often seems the most predominant element of the work. Mrs. Lammle tells us a story of Madame Edna giving a young girl waiting outside her fortune-telling parlor a Charlotte Russe, meeting her again, years later in an expensive restaurant, where once more she shared her Charlotte Russe. The two meet up a third time at the convention where Charlotte Russes are served as dessert, where Madame Edna, attending another affair, becomes lost in the basement and, to seek help, knocks on the same girl’s door.

     There is also, underlying the different tales which make up the “dark ride,” a series of metaphysical potentialities. Zendavesta believes that we live on the “inside” the earth rather than on the surface, and is looking for the way “out.” The Translator’s text seems to hint at some magic potion or some edible, transformative substance. Mrs. Lammle speaks of The Book of Revelation. Ed and Edna have long ago created fun-house rides, including a version of Ezekiel’s wheel. Yet these feel, in their hints at the hockiness of a great deal of American religiosity, less enlightening than slightly satiric. And, in the end, each of the characters appears to accuse the author of having turned to philosophy rather than action, one by one repeating “I’m not interested in philosophy. Just tell me how it ends.” Like a ride, “coming and going” ends Jenkin’s Dark Ride, with the various enticing stories connecting in some places and falling apart in others.

      Any connections, consequently, are left to the audience, not to the author to sew together. What Jenkin has marvelously whipped up is a whirlwind voyage through the heads of dark dreamers which includes most the favorite American pastimes: invention, acquiring wealth, love, dreams, religion, perversity, and violence. Put together they spell something, even if one cannot completely translate the magic talisman. If nothing else, in Jenkin’s heady brew, they absolutely entertain!  

 

Los Angeles, January 24, 2013

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2013).

 

Samuel Beckett | Waiting for Godot / 2009 || Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, and Stephen Sondheim | West Side Story / 2009 || Eugène Ionesco | Exit the King / 2009

 

sweating it: three mid-20th century tragi-comedies

by Douglas Messerli

Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot / Studio 54, New York City; the production I saw was a matinee on Saturday, May 9, 2009

Arthur Laurents (book), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), Leonard Bernstein (music) West Side Story / Palace Theatre, New York; the production I saw was Thursday, May 7, 2009

Eugène Ionesco Exit the King / Ethel Barrymore Theater, New York; the production I saw was a matinee on Sunday, May 10, 2009

Through accidental intent I saw three plays on my recent trip to New York City, all works from the 1950s through the early 1960s that revealed not only Auden's description of that period as "The Age of Anxiety," but reiterated from me the dramatic tensions at play in 1950s society. All three works might be described by the subtitle of Waiting for Godot (1953), a "tragicomedy," although one does not necessarily think of that phrase in relationship with West Side Story. Yet its appropriateness became clearer than ever upon seeing Arthur Laurent's new production.

     The terrified participants of Beckett's landscape—in this production presented as an inhospitable plain surrounded by rocks—have seemingly nowhere else to go, although they incessantly speak of "going." Although Vladimir (stunningly played by Bill Irwin) and Estragon (Nathan Lane) spend each night separately (sleep is probably the most isolated activity that man endures), they gather each morning to discuss, in the absurd language of Laurel and Hardy, their possible alternatives and attempt to entertain themselves until the arrival, promised each day to Didi (Vladimir), of Godot.

     Numerous readers and critics of Beckett's work have speculated that Godot is God. He is, after all, seen as the agent of their salvation; at the end of the play, as they discuss possible suicide, the two speak:

                  

                   vladimir: We'll hang ourselves to-morrow. (Pause.) Unless Godot comes.

                       estragon: And if he comes?

                       vladimir: We'll be saved.

 

Even the child who reports each day that Godot (pronounced in this production as Godot) will not arrive describes his master in the standard Christian manner: a man with a white beard. Yet if this elusive Godot is God, perhaps we would be better without him, or, at least better off not spending our entire lives in wait.

      The conditions of their lives—both are tramps who apparently recall a previous life in which they were better off—is abhorrent. Gogo, in particular, is plagued by swelling feet, and is often unable to remove his shoes. Each night, so he tells Didi, he is beaten while he sleeps. So too is the child's brother beaten by Godot.

      The appearance of a passing landowner (he claims to own all the land about), Pozzo (grandly performed by John Goodman) and his slave, Lucky (John Glover) demonstrates the scandalous condition of others. Carrying Pozzo's dinner, table, and folding chair, Lucky stumbles about on a chain, whipped from behind by Pozzo. Both Vladimir and Estragon are horrified to discover someone worse off than themselves, but gradually perceive that Pozzo is completely dependent on Lucky; and when Lucky is commanded to dance and to think, we discover he is such a clumsy oaf and academic bore, that he is perhaps more useful to the world in his subjugation than in freedom.

      Even more disconcerting is the Alzheimer's-like condition of all Beckett's figures save Didi. When Pozzo meets up with the two on the second day, he is even more dependent on others than previously, but has no memory of meeting the two tramps a day earlier. Estragon must be reminded each day of the previous day's events and is often incredulous of Didi's recountings. Even the child who reporting for Godot cannot recall seeing Didi each day. For Didi it is as if what he perceives is eternally in question, and he spends much of the play trying to uncover evidence that his vision of reality is correct.

      But that is just what makes this work a tragedy: there is no reality. And it is also that which makes it comedy, which induces us to laugh: because there is no reality, these beings have nowhere else to go. Their entreaty to "go," "Yes, let's go," results only in stasis. They have no choice but to return day after day to their rocky lives to wait for someone who may beckon, but will probably never come. In Beckett's final stage instruction, They do not move, even the most determinist of us realizes that we are all "frozen" into our own ridiculous lives. Like figures of the commedia dell'arte, we can only pull up our trousers and wait for the inevitable end of existence.

 

      Ionesco's less performed Exit the King (1962) explores just that end. King Berenger's (Tony winner Geoffrey Rush) empire has, over his long rule, shrunken extensively. The sun has frighteningly diminished and a large sinkhole threatens to suck up the entire kingdom. As Queen Marguerite (Susan Sarandon) recognizes: "The party's over," reporting to her husband that by the end of the play he will die.

      Terrified by that fact, Berenger fights his approaching death with the tenacity of a spoiled child let loose at a table of doting adults. The palace maid (Andrea Martin)—although complaining of the endless burdens of her job (she is only one of three who continue to serve the court)—servilely straightens his winding robe, picks up the crumpled carpet, cooks, and performs thousands of other chores. The King's younger consort, Queen Marie (Lauren Ambrose) coos her love, insisting that he continue to fight his inevitable death.

      Fight he does, but with the attacks coming every few moments, Berenger's  absurd pleadings and rush of memories become more and more ridiculous. What may seem to be a topic that would send most audiences fleeing from the theater is here transformed into a long-standing joke (almost  overplayed in this production), as the King dies and dies and dies, Marguerite cheering him on as Marie tenderly dotes on his numerous last gasps.

     One of the difficulties in this play (as in Beckett's) is to keep those laughs coming while, at the same moment, the audience grows uneasy in its recognition that it, like the characters, simply must wait and die. And although Ionesco could be as wickedly ironic as Beckett at times, Beckett's crisper diction—which at nearly every moment seems to combine the tragic with the comic—allows his play to better function than Ionesco's broader farcical conceits. Still, in all, Exit the King is a brilliant play that tenderly takes the King (and we, his consorts) from living into death.

     Both of these plays, accordingly, offer us a world in which its characters are literally forced to face the void, nearly swooning in its heat.

     Based as it is on Shakespeare's great tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story at first appears to be without the comic redemption of the Beckett and Ionesco plays. Yes, there are comic moments in Laurent's script, the self mockery of the Jet's psychologically frenzied lives expressed in "Gee, Officer Krupke" and the equally playful putdown of the Shark women against a girl who wants to return to Puerto Rico in "America" (note: unlike the great dance scene in the motion picture version of the musical, in which both Shark males and females dance "America," the stage version includes only women). And there are those tender and light moments "Something Coming," "One Hand, One Heart," and "I Feel Pretty"(sung in this production in Spanish). But for most viewers, I suggest, West Side Story would not seem to be properly described as a tragicomedy. Where's the comedy? many might ask.

      If we recognize, however, that West Side Story presents us with a society with no adult moral examples (Doc is so passive he is completely ineffectual, the police are as nearly as disgusting in their prejudices against the Puerto Ricans as the Jets), it becomes clear that the given world of this musical is as absurd as that presented in both the Beckett and Ionesco works. Living is being part of a gang, and being part of a gang is to be willing to fight, kill, or be killed. Although both Maria and Tony attempt to live outside that reality, they have no other choice, and are inevitably pulled in through the vortex of love and hate into the absurd world surrounding them.

     On the streets of the upper West Side, New York, Tony has no choice but to fight for his own kind, even if it means destroying, in the process, the woman he loves. Only Maria seems intellectually to be able to create a different reality, a reality not based on territorial and familial domains, but on love; despite the fact that Tony has killed her own brother, she insists that her love for Tony takes precedence.

      Obviously Tony's inevitable death produces no laughter. But in terms of the play's inverted realities, his death returns that world to normality.

      The singing and dancing of this production was excellent, and the leads, Matt Cavenaugh and Josefina Scaglione were far better than Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood. But I still prefer the movie version, simply because its characters are better delineated than the stage production, and Jerome Robin's filmic dances, particularly "America" and "Cool" (which on the stage is performed in the drugstore early in the play), are simply masterpieces which are nearly impossible to match. Although Laurent's new direction brought two of the songs into Spanish, it had no great effect on the timbre of the piece, and the cute dancing chorus members detracted from the anxiety of the world the script expressed.

      As the film's Baby John made clear through his tears and the gang's pent-up fears released in "Cool" evidenced, the young men and women of Bernstein's West Side New York were also forced to live in a sweat. And unlike the film, where there is at least a hope of change as the gang members come momentarily together to carry off the body of the slain Tony, in the stage version his corpse remains bound to earth, Maria mourning him alone as she declares that she too has now learned "how to hate." As in Exit the King she has now come face to face with death, and as the curtain falls, just as do the characters in Waiting for Godot, she is frozen in space.

 

Los Angeles, May 30, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (May 2009).