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Macbeth with Patrick Stewart

As Shakespeare's shortest tragedy, it's quite a feat to make Macbeth boring. But add the anachronistic setting of a fascist environment (yes, we're in a time of war, but the symbolism is rather heavy-handed) plus the annoying and utterly irrelevant use of film clips of goose-stepping soldiers flashing around the set, and you're half way there. Patrick Stewart was undoubtedly brilliant – he is, it seems, in everything – but even he can't carry the entire production. I remembered we had seen him in The Caretaker with Kyle MacLachlan, and he was amazing. Kate Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth is alternately resplendent and cowering, and strangely hung her head and seemed like she wanted to disappear into the ground at the ovation. The set is rather good – a strange, stark medical room that becomes the context for the three witches as bizarre nurses, whose costumes transform fluidly from nurse to nun to waitress. The barrenness of this set (although marred by the superfluous projected imagery) has only an industrial china sink and a huge, clanking freight elevator, that serve to provide a dark, subterranean feeling and to evoke a chill in your imagination from its very dankness. The set moves easily from being a basement, an experimental operating room to the icy kitchen where Lady Macbeth tries to rid of herself of the ever-lasting blood on her hands. Still, the laziness of the encroaching Birnam Wood in movie form, and the denigration of the witches' chanting to rap, left us unsatisfied, and dare I say it, a little annoyed.

Macbeth is at the Lyceum Theater on West 45th St. until May 23rd. Photograph from nytimes.com

Kirov Ballet at New York City Center and St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre

Yesterday's budding spring weather brought us a flurry of activity topped off with a bit of culture in the form of the Kirov, a.k.a. Marinsky Ballet and Orchestra at the New York City Center.

Rewind. Last month Natasha and I had the great fortune of visiting the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg to attend a performance of Swan Lake during the city's ballet festival. On the night of the performance we made our way from our hotel to the theatre under leaden skies, along murky canals and over muddy thoroughfares to find Russia's other, less big, ballet. Like many of the great St. Petersburg landmarks, the Mariinsky Theatre is an impressive structure of massive proportions. Unlike the New York City Center, this theatre dominates the street and neighborhood in which it sits with an ornately detailed green and white exterior that makes it look like a very sweet, if slightly dirty, wedding cake of culture.

The inside of the building was a no less impressive example of Russian grandeur and post-Soviet upkeep. Mosaic floors and dimly lit hallways led to our mezzanine area's coat check that was manned by a babushka whose features were as worn as the wooden table she stood behind. As we settled into our rigid seats that were held in place by a jerry rigged system (see inset photo) that would have made my seventh grade shop teacher stop the drill presses, I got a chill. No, it was not caused by the cold dampness of St. Petersburg, it was the same chill I feel when I see the diamond in Yankee Stadium. The body knows that history has happened here, it senses the spirit of superior athletes and the unworldly feats performed by their mortal vessels.

I must say, I am not that well-versed in the ballet, and therefore felt like I had arrived in Mecca without cracking open the Koran. But as the performance began I became a true believer. Like I said, I am a novice when it comes to this art form, and therefore do not possess the right vocabulary to describe it, so I won't do it the injustice and injury. However, I did walk out with a desire to learn more, and see more. So, when we got back to New York and Natasha found out the Kirov was coming to town, we jumped and leaped at the opportunity.

Unlike St. Petersburg, our walk to the theatre was met with both a warmth in temperature and human interaction. As we made our way to our two securely fastened and heavily cushioned seats I scanned the crowed that was abuzz with anticipation, Russian ex-patriots, dancers and pensioners smelling of pee. The show was a bit of a poo-poo platter of this 200-year old company's interpretation of ballet's greatest hits. Petipa’s The Kingdom of Shadows from La Bayadere; Fokine’s Scheherazade and Chopiniana; Gorsky’s The Grand Pas de Deux from Don Quixote; Balanchine’s Rubies (an Excerpt from Jewels) and Ballet Imperial; as well as Forsythe’s Steptext were all on the bill. Forget the sweet science and the beautiful game, this was a brutal battle between humans and physics. Bodies and music lovingly mixed, tenderly twisted and turned. Power, grace, synchronicity and individuality, perfection and error. Good god, am I getting soft or getting sucked into some high-culture vortex? How 'bout those Yankees? What's an adagio? Next?

Is.Man at St. Ann's Warehouse

Is.Man

I am plagued by codes. Computer codes. Safety codes. Genetic codes. And codes of conduct. I am overwhelmed by the noise in my head, the constant buzzing, the crossing of wires and the failure of human connection. Good codes that protect us, bad codes that separate us. But who is to decide which is which? Why are we torn from our human family and separated into rooms of culture and religions? And what do we find when we are forced to leave the limited space of our rooms to subject ourselves to the codes of another room?

Maybe some of the answers lie in Adelheid Roosen's Is.Man that opens tonight at St. Ann's Warehouse.

Is.Man is a raw, 90 minute look into one family's experience of moving from one room (Turkey) into the next (Holland), a story partially based on the writer's interviews of Muslim men convicted of crimes in the latter. The four character production focuses on three generations of Turkish men struggling with the concept of namus (honor) and its impact on women and a society whose laws and ethics do not include honor killings designed to determine the sexual purity of their women and a clan's integrity.

Thoughtfully written and powerfully delivered on a stark stage where one of the few indications of female presence comes in the form dress-like pillars that are hung on actual clothes hangers, the story is played out by conversations taking place out of time and out of context by a grandfather playing instruments, singing and speaking in Turkish, a father writing and lamenting from his prison chair, a mystical Sulfi Imam who silently meditates or twirls his way to center stage, and a son who translates and interacts with the audience as he tries to make sense of his father's familicide.

One of the most powerful moments comes when the father, after having his back to the audience for almost the entire play turns around and asks the audience to challenge the concept of namus for the sake of the children. He urges us, the audience, to join him in chanting, "our children, our children". But the audience, not knowing what to do or say, uncomfortably sits in silence. Maybe this is the code of the theater, or maybe a code of our society to be suspicious of this stranger's invitation to heal our differences and embrace a future that is more humane.

By crossing into to our room we are forced to look at their room through their eyes, actions and words, and in turn, our own room. As our world gets smaller, and more doors are opened, interaction with other cultures and religions will become more frequent and more personal than we might like. Regardless, a code of silence is no longer applicable. It's time to look to a genetic code that knows no god, no cultural, no borders, no law, no hate and no shame. It's time to tap in that PIN and buy some tickets to see Is.Man that will be running through October 14th.

RSC plays The Seagull at BAM Harvey Theater

I grew up going to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon, lucky enough to get used to seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company, which I think you can never get tired of. OK, so The Merry Wives of Windsor at Christmas was a little tiresome, but the RSC is normally unparalleled. A Midsummer Night's Dream directed by Adrian Noble has stuck in my mind ever since. But the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Shakespeare's home town has nothing on the BAM theater. Preserved like a strange relic, it stands uassuming in a strange part of Downtown Brooklyn. Someone did the right thing at that theater by leaving it alone. No new paint, no ridiculous construction, just exposed brick, peeling paint and crumbing columns. Yes, it feels like debris might fall on you at any minute, but that's part of the charm, isn't it?

Yes, I expected the production to be full of the themes of unrequited love, ambitious angst, the power of potential, the issues of talent, the dread of failure and the concept of life as something to be wasted or used to its fullest. They were there alright. What I didn't really think about was how well the RSC would tackle the humor of the play, taking it comfortably into British idiosyncrasies and sardonically using the power of pause to make the humorous parts of Chekhov's play really, really funny. I got to the play exhausted and not sure I could sit through three hours and ten minutes of emotional theater. But the RSC was so damned funny that I forgot I was sitting on the thinly-padded seats of a rickety bench and focused on my belly laughs instead. We didn't see Ian McKellan play Peter Sorin but William Gaunt did an impeccable job. Monica Dolan was a brilliant Masha and Frances Barber an amazing Arkadina.

Romola Garai stole the show as Nina though. At once naive, awkward and shiny-new she pirouettes around the stage with an awkwardness that only someone with real introspection could conjure. The play-within-a-play theme is a tough one to grasp, but Garai took it to a new level. The sybmolism of the transformation of Nina as the seagull, broken and helpless and the subsequent and parallel rise of Konstantin was achieved brilliantly. Nina's marionette-like figure gets pulled this way and that by different hands, and yet it is her first puppeteer that suffers in the end.

The wonderful thing about this production (well, one of them anyway) is that it is the same cast as in King Lear, playing concurrently, both directed by Trevor Nunn. Barber swings between Arkadina and Goneril, Garai as the two young innocents Nina and Cordelia, Gaunt between Sorin and The Earl of Gloucester, immediately making parallels between these two immense plays. Seeing both these productions in conjuction would, I am certain, be something I would remember for the rest of my life. Swooping onto Cragislist, I discovered that I wasn't the only one to be desperate for tickets. I thought I would pay anything, but I was wrong. I am not going to pay $500 for a ticket, but there are many others out there that will. Perhaps I should fly to London in November instead. I think it would be worth it.

Photographs by RSC and BAM.

Strange Fruit at Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park

There are so many things going on in our beloved neighborhood, it's quite tiring to 1) keep up with it all and 2) get any work done. Oh well, play in DUMBO it is.

So admist our Bastille Day celebrations on Saturday, we fitted in heading down to the park to see Australia's Strange Fruit production of Swoon.

The production is apparently inspired by swaying wheat in the wind, which is exactly what it feels like. The background for this show was amazing, framed by both the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. It was a stunning day, and the vibrant colors of the costumes were beautiful against the bright blue sky. The women's costumes were particularly good because of the hoops in the skirts, making them really seem like they were floating in the air. I almost wish that we had seen their "field" production with eight not four players, as I think this would have been more in tune with the dramatic backdrop. Either way, it was really enjoyable and quite a spectacle to see.

The Wooster Group presents Hamlet at St Ann's Warehouse

As we walked out of our building on Water Street in DUMBO, we saw a shiny, brand-spanking-new Mercedes faltering at the intersection. We knew it was lost because shiny new Mercedes aren't indigenous to DUMBO, so it only meant one thing. The owner of the car was going where we were that night, St Ann's Warehouse. That's the thing about The Wooster Group. They have a very loyal and dedicated following and the great thing is that people will even follow them –gasp!– over the river.

The Wooster Group's foray into Shakespeare is certainly not your mother's Hamlet, well not my mother's, anyway. And it is certainly not like any Hamlet I have seen before and that's a good thing. The Wooster Group describes it as an "archeaological excursion into America's cultural past". What that means is they were highly drawn to the 1964 Richard Burton Hamlet which was filmed with 17 cameras at differing angles, the actors in rehearsal clothes. The footage was then edited into a film and shown at 200 theaters around the country for a period of 2 days only. The film was then supposed to be destroyed, but Burton's widow kept a copy. All in all, an alluring concept, and very well done.

The Wooster Group takes this film as the platform for their own Hamlet. Well, not a platform but a basis, an imitation and homage. The film is projected as the backdrop to the play, and the players stay impeccably true to its parent, imitating their stage directions, gestures and movements. This sounds simple enough, but this imitation is true to the angles that the 17 different camera create on the film version, meaning that the angles and views change constantly. The Group deals with this by moving themselves and also the props and furniture (which luckily for them was minimal) in accordance with the camera angles, stage front being the screen.

If this doesn't sound complicated enough, the Group also skips through some of the footage (although not much; the play is a bum-aching 3 hours long) and the film also has a few blips, all of which are faithfully translated by the players on the stage. But the film and play are also sped up and slowed down so that the speech is in tune with the original iambic pentameter; the meter in which most of Shakespeare's plays are written, the meter of English poetry. This would normally be fine, but this requires the jerkiness of changing the film to be in accordance with the meter and then the players also. Confused yet?

The film is also toyed with a little – characters are erased from the screen to compound the ghost-on-ghost theme of the play and also this particular production of it. You find yourself testing them as you watch their jerky hand movements and stage jumps that are always a meticulous mirror of what is going on in the backdrop of the film behind them. I have to say that whether or not their production was successful, their execution of their intent was flawless. And their intent was a massive feat.

Was the acting good? Certainly. Hamlet himself was powerful, troubled and arresting. What was particularly effective was some of the later scenes in Act IV, when Hamlet's demise is being discussed but he is not actually part of the scene. LeCompte uses Hamlet to move the props on the stage, wheeling the furniture around, present but not quite there. Hamlet is also the controller of the footage – he pauses it, skips through it, controls it and owns the story and quite literally this stage. Gertrude and Ophelia were both played by Kate Valk, which heightened the contrast between the innocent young girl and incestuous mother in a very interesting manner. The film's graininess and poor quality lends itself very well to being a symbol of the flickering ghost, a constant reminder of Hamlet's father, ever present. It's all really rather clever: the use of a transient ghost of a film being used as symbolism for the ghost on the stage. Do I sound sarcastic? Well, maybe just a little bit.

The Wooster Group's intention was fulfilled technically extremely well. Did it lend me any further understand or emotion connected to the underlying meaning of the play? Not at all. But I don't think it intended to.

Mary Rose by J.M. Barrie

Last night we went to see Mary Rose by J.M. Barrie, yes, he of Peter Pan fame. I was intrigued because it has not been played in New York for over 50 years and is little known. And if I had known the background before I went, I would have been even more intrigued. In the theater I tried to read the biographical history of J.M. Barrie whilst two fur coat ladies scuffled over a petty disagreement a few seats away. Who knew that ladies over 60 from the Upper West Side would be so aggressive when they come downtown?

James Mathew Barrie's brother, his mother's favorite, died on the eve of his 14th birthday and his mother never recovered from the loss. In his mother's mind the son that died remained a child forever in her memory, never allowed to reach adulthood. James tried to fill the void in his mother's life, trying to speak like his brother and even wearing his clothes. Strangely, James stopped growing when he reached 5 feet tall, also remaining an ostensible child, never reaching the height of an adult. The idea of growing up and remaining a perpetual child had a significant impact on Barrie, most famously mainfested in the concept of the boy that never grew up, Peter Pan.