Photo: Craig Bailey. From left to right, Thomas Derrah, DeLance Minefee, and Michael Kaye.

 

Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer prizewinning Clybourne Park, a SpeakEasy production now playing at Boston’s Center for the Arts, uses Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 classic, A Raisin in the Sun, as a springboard to discuss race relations in the United States. A White man, living in an era when many believe we are moving towards a “post-racial” or color-blind America, Norris’s perspective diverges widely and wildly from Hansberry’s. A Raisin in the Sun was deeply personal to Hansberry. Its story of a Black family, whose purchase of a house in a segregated middle-class neighborhood aroused the White community’s hostility, was based on her parents’ experience. The oppressive racism of the period permeated her life. A Raisin in the Sun treats a working-class African American family’s efforts to achieve the American dream in the mid-twentieth-century.

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Zachary Quinto, Cherry Jones, Celia Keenan-Bolger. Photo: Michael J. Lutch.

In his preface to The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams wrote that since it is a “memory play, [it] can be presented with unusual freedom of convention,” advice which director John Tiffany followed in his American Repertory Theatre production. The set, which represents the claustrophobic apartment of the Wingfield family, is composed of two hexagonal platforms that appear to float above a reflecting pool. The effect of this metaphor is to denote the family’s isolation. Stage right is the dining room, stage left the living room; both are furnished sparely, but, for the most part, realistically. The living room is dominated by a red patterned couch and matching rug.

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Photo: Richard Termine

The Yale Repertory Theatre’s production of The Servant of Two Masters is an exploration of commedia dell’arte acting style. The irony is that although Carlo Goldoni, earlier in his career, had devised scenarios for commedia troupes to improvise upon, his 1753 Servant of Two Masters was fully scripted. This current revival of Goldoni’s play underwent numerous iterations in its development. Translated by Christina Sibyl, adapted by Constance Congdon, it was further adapted by actor Steven Epp and director Christopher Bayes to extract every possible laugh.

While Goldoni retained the masked comic characters and a basic commedia plot, his play is more refined than its model, which is certainly not the case in this production. Slapstick comedy abounds literally, with lots of noisy slaps (sans the two wooden sticks) and figuratively, frequently based on bodily functions. Most of the time, the show moves very fast, sometimes too fast, so that rare changes of pace are welcome as, for example, when Beatrice (Sarah Agnew), Smeraldina (Liz Wisan), and Clarice (Adina Verson) sing their lyrical love lament in operatic style.

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Photo: A. Kharitinov

Family Happiness, which played at Boston’s Cutler Majestic Theatre on January 26 and 27, is an extraordinary production. Adapted from Tolstoy’s novella of the same name by Russia’s renowned late director Piotr Fomenko, who also staged it, movement and text are given equal value. Although Family Happiness has a much simpler plot, particularly in the staged version, it bears a resemblance to Tolstoy’s later novel, Anna Karenina, which also examines marital happiness and unhappiness. But where the novella is realistic, the play is abstract and symbolic.

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Photo: Yves Renaud

For the second time this season Boston’s ArtsEmerson is playing host to a Montreal troupe. Early fall saw the return of Les Sept Doigts de la Main, a hybrid company that explores links between theatre and circus. December began with the experimental Lemieux Pilon 4D Art’s presentation of its intermedial La Belle et la Bête, complete with an updated plot.

Onstage actors relate to and with virtual ones. Of the three live characters, the Lady (Diana D’Aquila), Belle (Bénédicte Décary), and the Beast (Vincent Leclerc), only the latter appears in computer generated form, and then rarely. Belle, the young alienated artist usually dressed in black, attempts to work through the loss of her mother by hurling blood red paint at canvasses. The Beast, grief stricken because of the death of his beloved years earlier, lives alone in a castle metaphorically worlds away from Belle’s studio. His ugliness is barely suggested by facial scars, too faint to be seen by audience members sitting at a distance from the stage.

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Joel Colodner, Zachary Eisenstadt, Luke Murtha

 

The Chosen, the Lyric Stage’s latest production, is based on Chaim Potok’s well-known novel. Written in 1967, and adapted for the stage by Potok in collaboration with Aaron Posner in 1999, the play is an exercise in nostalgia. It takes us back to an insular Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn during the 1940s. The play is naturalistic with overtones of symbolist theatre, its style somewhat reminiscent of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. It too has a narrator who, like Our Town’s Stage Manager, plays several roles, the most significant the adult Reuven (Charles Linshaw). However, this character is more a device to fill in the exposition than Wilder’s omniscient Stage Manager. Rather than enriching the drama, the awkward presence of the narrator points up its lack, while emphasizing the paltry number of characters.

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PHOTO.Lionel Patrick Kerman.

l.Bulle Ogier et Madeleine Renaud

R.Marie Christine Barrault, Guila Klara Kessous

Marguerite Duras’ Savannah Bay was performed at Cambridge’s Loeb Drama Center (home of the American Repertory Theatre) on February 21 in honor of the centennial of Jean-Louis Barrault’s birth. In the cast were the well-known French stage and screen actress Marie-Christine Barrault and her young disciple Guila Clara Kessous. Mme Barrault is the niece of actor-director Jean-Louis Barrault and his wife, actress Madeleine Renaud. During their lifetimes, Barrault and Renaud reached the pinnacle of theatrical success in France, forming their own company in 1946. As artistic director, and for many years leading actor, Barrault not only drew from a broad repertory of classics – French and otherwise – but introduced new and experimental works, many of which gained renown. The company’s tours brought the best of French culture to the wider world.

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