Author: Jane Baldwin

Jane Baldwin, a longtime faculty member of the Boston Conservatory, taught Modern Drama, Acting, and Humanities. She is a recipient of the Canadian Heather McCallum Award for the best English essay and the French language Prix André G. Bourassa. Her books and articles include Michel Saint-Denis and the Shaping of the Modern Actor (Greenwood Press), Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style and Other Writings, which she edited (Routledge Press), and Vie et morts de la création collective/Lives and Deaths of Collective Creation, co-edited with Jean-Marc Larrue and Christiane Page (Vox Theatri). Her essay, “Michel Saint-Denis: Training the Complete Actor,” is published in Actor Training, ed., Alison Hodge (Routledge Press). Her latest work, “The Accidental Rebirth of Collective Creation: Jacques Copeau, Michel Saint-Denis, Léon Chancerel, and Improvised Theatre” appears in Toward a New History of Collective Creation, eds., Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva and Scott Proudfit (Palgrave). Although most of her reviews are from the Boston area, she has followed the Stratford Festival in Canada for many years.”
Sontag: Reborn: A History Lesson in Multimedia at ArtsEmerson’s Paramount Theatre

Sontag: Reborn: A History Lesson in Multimedia at ArtsEmerson’s Paramount Theatre

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Moe Angelos as Susan Sontag. Photo James Gibbs

Sontag: Reborn, the second production the Builders Association has brought to ArtsEmerson this season is another intermedial piece. Like its predecessor, Sontag: Reborn relies heavily on video to tell its story. Unlike its predecessor, House Divided, a drama of many characters, complex setting, and numerous incidents that revolve around the Great Depression and the Great Recession, Sontag: Reborn is a dialogue with one character.

Joshua Higgason’s simple setting, consisting of a wide rectangular desk covered with various and changing props, a scrim in front of it and a screen behind with a camera above; Laura Mroczkowski’s varied lighting; Dan Dobson’s sound design; and Austin Switser’s brilliant video work bring vivid life to a piece that had the potential to bore.

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Not by Bread Alone: The Nagala’at Acting Ensemble Company, World’s only Professional Deaf-Blind Theatre Company at ArtsEmerson

Not by Bread Alone: The Nagala’at Acting Ensemble Company, World’s only Professional Deaf-Blind Theatre Company at ArtsEmerson

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Photo: Avshalow Ahraron.

Not by Bread Alone may be the most unusual theatre experience I have ever undergone. It is a devised piece created by the professional director Adina Tal and the blind and deaf members of the Israeli Nalaga’at Acting Ensemble Company, none of whom had ever appeared onstage before undertaking Light Is Heard in Zig Zag, first performed in 2004 after two years of rehearsal. The Nalaga’ at, whose name means Do Touch, is the world’s only professional deaf-blind acting troupe.

Light Is Heard in Zig Zag, attempted to bring the spectators into the performers’ world, i.e., a world of only three senses. The company’s talent and the work’s uniqueness made it a success that prompted the group to develop their second production, Not by Bread Alone. The eleven performers and their director built on the techniques they had acquired during their first undertaking.

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A Whale of a Plot: Samuel D. Hitner’s Show at Boston’s SpeakEasy

A Whale of a Plot: Samuel D. Hitner’s Show at Boston’s SpeakEasy

The Whale Photo
John Kuntz and Georgia Lyman. Photo Credit: Craig Bailey.

Boston’s SpeakEasy Theatre is currently presenting the New England premiere of Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale, winner of the prestigious 2013 Lucille Lortel Award.

The play revolves around Charlie, a solitary, secluded, cetaceous-like character, set on gorging himself to death. The reasons for his behavior remain unclear, even mysterious, until the play’s end. Charlie’s days are spent mostly sitting on a sprung sofa, enveloped in a huge sweat suit, gasping as he munches away. The slovenly stage and the space beneath are teeming with remnants of food packets.

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‘Midsummer Night’s Dream : Nap time at the Cutler Majestic

‘Midsummer Night’s Dream : Nap time at the Cutler Majestic

OnemidsummerMSND(2) Photo Credit Simone Annand.    David Ricardo-Pearce as Oberon.

Reviewed by Jane Baldwin

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, now playing at Boston’s Cutler Majestic is the second show produced by the Bristol Old Vic Theatre Company in collaboration with the South African Handspring Puppet Company. The first, The War Horse, adapted from a children’s novel was a renowned prizewinner dominated by its large and beautifully choreographed puppets.

Shakespeare’s play is directed and choreographed quite differently, conceivably because of the stylistic incongruities. The romantic comedy takes place in three different realms: the world of the rich and powerful, fairyland and its magic, and the laboring class. Like most of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, it is convoluted, revolving around three seemingly separate but related plots. To further complicate matters, many of the roles are double cast so as to accentuate similarities rather than variants. Theseus, the Duke of Athens and Oberon, the king of the fairies are both played by David Ricardo-Pearce while Saskia Portway enacts the Duke’s wife-to-be Hippolyta and Titania, the Queen of the fairies.

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Red-Eye to Havre de Grace: Edgar Allan Poe’s Voyage into Madness and Death

Red-Eye to Havre de Grace: Edgar Allan Poe’s Voyage into Madness and Death

Sophie Bortolussi as Virginia, Ean Sheehy as Poe. Photo by Johanna Austin.
Sophie Bortolussi as Virginia, Ean Sheehy as Poe. Photo by Johanna Austin.

Red-Eye to Havre de Grace resembles a story that might have been written by Edgar Allen Poe, dealing as it does with his mental degeneration and mysterious demise on October 7, 1849. It is particularly ironic that the death of the author considered the inventor of the detective tale has remained unsolved.

The creators of Red-Eye to Havre de Grace archly describe it as an “action opera.” While an interesting show, there is little action – at least in the usual meaning – and comparatively
little singing. It is more dialogue based with Ean Sheehy, as Edgar Allen Poe, speaking most of the lines, assisted by Jeremy Wilhelm in a variety of roles. Sheehy’s remarkable resemblance to Poe brings an element of realism to an unrealistic play.

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House/Divided: From the Great Depression to the Great Recession

House/Divided: From the Great Depression to the Great Recession

Jess Barbagallo, Sean Donovan, Josh Higgason, LaToya Lewis, Matthew Karges, & Moe Angelos. Photo Credit: James Gibbs
Jess Barbagallo, Sean Donovan, Josh Higgason, LaToya Lewis, Matthew Karges, & Moe Angelos.
Photo Credit: James Gibbs

House/Divided at ArtsEmerson

House/Divided is a politically leftist work, part docudrama and part story, devised by the Builders Association, a long-term collaborative based in New York, which has toured worldwide. ArtsEmerson presented House/Divided at Boston’s Cutler Majestic from January 30 to February 2.

The intermedial production makes use of yesterday’s scrims and today’s screens as well as live and recorded music. Almost nothing has solidity, not even the house that is “built” at the production’s start and remains center stage in various iterations as a symbol of the events taking place.

House/Divided juxtaposes the Great Depression and the Great Recession. The 1930s scenes, with dialogue and narration drawn from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, focus on the Joads’ loss of their house and farmland, followed by their desperate journey from Oklahoma to California in the hope of finding work.

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Insignificance: A play with some significance

Insignificance: A play with some significance

 

CST-Insignificance-3The Nora Theatre Company is presently performing British playwright Terry Johnson’s Insignificance at the Central Square Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In residence along with the Underground Railway Theatre at the up-to-date, attractive, and flexible black box playhouse, the companies have an affiliation with the Catalyst Collaborative at MIT, located nearby. The affiliation includes a mandate to produce works of scientific interest whenever possible. Insignificance falls somewhat awkwardly into this category given that the theory of relativity is connected to the storyline.

Insignificance makes use of a familiar plot device seen in such plays as Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, in which notable twentieth-century personages are juxtaposed in unlikely circumstances. Here, the locale is a mid-level New York hotel room, the time 1953. The brightly colored baby blue room has two doors, one stage left which leads to the corridor; the second, stage right opens into a bathroom unseen by the audience – a common farcical set up. Scene designer Brynna Bloomfield further accentuates the impression that we are about to watch a Feydeau-like farce by placing a large bed downstage.

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: The Color Purple

: The Color Purple

An Engaging, Entertaining, and Thought Provoking Musical

purple_08Boston’s SpeakEasy Theatre has a winning production in The Color Purple, the musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize novel. Director Paul Daigneault mounted an energetic, exciting, and even stirring show with a talented cast of singers, dancers, and actors. While the presentation is powerful and follows Walker’s storyline, Marsha Norman’s sanitized and simplified adaptation lacks the depth of the original text.

The play begins in the early twentieth-century South and follows the life of Celie a poor, rural overworked, victimized black woman, understandably lacking all self-confidence and hope. Raped by her stepfather, she has her first child at age 14 and another soon after. He takes the babies from her and only years later does she discover that they are alive and secure. Her mother dead, her babies gone, Celie’s only friend and confidant is Nettie, her pretty, bright younger sister. The stepfather gives the hard-working Celie (along with a cow) to a brutal man she refers to as Mister and who, in turn, abuses her and drives away Nettie with his sexual advances. Alone, with no one to love and no one who loves her, Celie confides in God through letters, the narrative device for the book and, to a degree, the musical.

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Working: A Vision Unfulfilled

Working: A Vision Unfulfilled

Working production 1

Photo: Mark S. Howard. Entire Cast on stage.

Working, now playing at Boston’s Lyric Stage, is an updated version of Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso’s 1978 musical based on Studs Terkel’s book. Terkel’s 750 page Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, a compilation of interviews with mostly ordinary (read working-class) people, is unabashedly leftist, as is the show.

While remaining faithful in most respects to Terkel’s vision – albeit with fewer characters – Schwartz and Faso (with the help of Gordon Greenberg) inserted several characters and episodes into their new rendition drawn from today’s ongoing economic crisis such as the jobless young who spring from the middle class, cubicle workers, and a hedge fund manager. The original play’s forty characters have been reduced to twenty-five and its numerous actors shrunk to six. At the Lyric Stage, the casting is laudably integrated, reflecting today’s demographics where color and ethnicity are not as limiting as they were thirty-five years ago.

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The Heart of Robin Hood: A legend turned on its head at the A.R.T.

The Heart of Robin Hood: A legend turned on its head at the A.R.T.

John Dean, Christina Bennett Lind, Christopher Sieber

Photo, Evgenia Eliseeva.

The American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.) is celebrating the holiday season with The Heart of Robin Hood, an updated, highly physical, and comic version of the old chestnut, with a little violence thrown in for good measure. The play, written by David Farr and directed by the innovative Gisli Örn Gardarsson, was first presented at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in England.

Gardarsson, a founder of the experimental Icelandic theatre and film company Vesturport, has staged a number of its widely renowned productions, which, like The Heart of Robin Hood, have been adaptations. In order to achieve a Vesturport-like quality at the RSC and the A.R.T., Gardarsson imported most of his technical team from the Icelandic Company.

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