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.”
Fragments: A Quintet of Beckett One-Act plays Visiting from Les Bouffes du Nord

Fragments: A Quintet of Beckett One-Act plays Visiting from Les Bouffes du Nord

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Introduction

Peter Brook’s productions of Fragments, a quintet of Beckett one-acts, and The Grand Inquisitor, drawn from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, arrived at ArtsEmerson the week of March 21 for a two-week run to much fanfare.  It marked the first time in forty years that a Brook production had played Boston.   In 1971, his history-making idiosyncratic and theatricalist A Midsummer Night’s Dream (produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company) had astounded audiences and critics here. 

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The Select: Stage adaptation of Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises Shows Lady Brett Ashley As The Bright Light of the Show.

The Select: Stage adaptation of Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises Shows Lady Brett Ashley As The Bright Light of the Show.

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 The Select, performed by the oddly named Elevator Repair Service, is a stage adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises.  Elevator Repair Service or ERS is a collaborative founded in 1991 with the aim of devising theatre pieces from non-theatrical material.  In its early years, the company worked with found texts to create highly energetic, idiosyncratic shows.  Of late, it has drawn its works from classics of American literature of the 1920s:  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and now Hemingway.

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One Touch of Venus: Kurt Weil Developes a More Sentimental Touch

One Touch of Venus: Kurt Weil Developes a More Sentimental Touch

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On Saturday night, March 8, I attended a production of Kurt Weill’s One Touch of Venus at the Boston Conservatory.  Before proceeding with this review, I should note that I taught at the Conservatory for many years.  Since I left, change has come to the institution in the form of new and renovated performance and classroom spaces, which were inaugurated in the 2010-2011 academic year. The mainstage facility has finally gained an orchestra pit; its proscenium stage was widened and deepened; and the ceiling raised, allowing for a rigging system.  Other improvements include a control booth, new lighting, and comfortable seating with excellent sight lines.  Conservatory musicals have always attracted a sizable public; now the shows and the students’ talents can be set off to better advantage. 

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Terminus : The Abbey Theatre at ArtsEmerson (Boston)

Terminus : The Abbey Theatre at ArtsEmerson (Boston)

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L.to R. Catherine Walker, Declan Conlon, Olwen Fouéré in Terminus

The Abbey Theatre’s production of Mark O’Rowe’s extraordinary Terminus is the final work of ArtsEmerson’s mini-Irish festival. (The other two were Kathrine Bates’ The Color of Rose and Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan.) Terminus is formally constructed: three characters – two women and a man – speaking monologues in verse, much of it rhyming. It observes the unities of time, place, and action: the tale they tell transpired over a single night, they remain in one place throughout, and the action is simply to recount.

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The Color of Rose: A world premiere by Kathrine Bates

The Color of Rose: A world premiere by Kathrine Bates

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L.to R. Judith Roberts, Theresa Masse, Karen MacDonald. Photo:Paul Marrot

ArtsEmerson’s Irish festival of three plays opened on January 30 with the world premiere of The Color of Rose, by Kathrine Bates. While not an Irish work, it celebrates the life of Boston’s historically most prominent Irish-American woman, Rose Kennedy. Structurally reminiscent of Edward Albee’s 1994 Three Tall Women, the play portrays Rose at three different ages, as played by three different actresses. All remain on stage throughout, interacting with each other. As the elderly Rose prepares for a television interview, she reflects on her life, discussing and sometimes arguing about its facts and meaning with her younger selves.

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Psy: A production of Les 7 doigts de la main in Boston

Psy: A production of Les 7 doigts de la main in Boston

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Photo: Davis Poulin

Psy, a creation of Montreal’s les 7 doigts de la main (the 7 fingers of the hand), is a performance unlike any I have ever seen, despite my fondness for the modern circus. The young multi-talented hyper energetic company combines athleticism, dance, and acting to create a storyline that explores psychological disorders through the trained circus body.  Each of the performers develops a character with a particular syndrome: They include manic-depression, multiple personality disorder, hypochondria, amnesia, and paranoia. The show avoids grimness through humor, although an underlying menace is ever-present.

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The Understudy , Boston premiere of the play by Theresa Rebeck.

The Understudy , Boston premiere of the play by Theresa Rebeck.

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The New Year ushered in the Boston premiere of Theresa Rebeck’s The Understudy at the Lyric Stage. A presence in the city for more than thirty years, the Lyric Stage has been under the leadership of artistic director Spiro Veloudos since 1997.  A 240 seat space with a thrust stage, the Lyric is located on the second floor of a YMCA in Boston’s Back Bay

The Lyric makes it a point to cast local professional actors, keep ticket prices moderate (which can mean low production values), and draw its repertory mainly from contemporary American drama and musicals, with the occasional bow to British works such as its memorable production of Caryl Churchill’s A Number.

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ArtsEmerson, A Boston Version of the Festsival TransAmérique. Interview with Director Rob Orchard.

ArtsEmerson, A Boston Version of the Festsival TransAmérique. Interview with Director Rob Orchard.

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            ArtsEmerson, the most exciting and creative theatre project Boston has seen in years, opened in the fall of 2010 under the leadership of executive director Robert Orchard.  Orchard met with me to discuss its development. Years in the making, the venture grew out of a partnership between Emerson College – a school of communication and the arts – and the city.  Emerson needed to expand;

Boston wanted to rehabilitate a decaying downtown area.  That the area included two run-down theatres – candidates for demolition, but architectural landmarks in their day – was a windfall for Emerson.  A deal was struck whereby Emerson would sell off its buildings, scattered through a high end residential section, and buy real estate in or near the infamous Combat Zone, Boston’s “adult entertainment” district. 

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The Laramie Project Ten Years Later. A long process that gained the admiration of the whole community.

The Laramie Project Ten Years Later. A long process that gained the admiration of the whole community.

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ArtsEmerson, a new and exciting theatre project has come to Boston.  Emerson College, a school of the arts and communication, which has acquired and renovated four downtown theatre spaces, inaugurated an annual season of American and international productions – seventeen in all for 2010-2011.  The series began in September with the Tectonic Theater’s The Laramie Project and The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later.

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Julius Caesar , directed by Arthur Nauzyciel at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge.

Julius Caesar , directed by Arthur Nauzyciel at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge.

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In February of 2008 the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts presented Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar directed by Arthur Nauzyciel.  For those unfamiliar with the American Repertory Theatre, a brief description is in order.

As its acronym ART indicates, it is a noncommercial theatre dedicated to art.  The kind of art the theatre produces and its worth has been a question since the ART’s arrival in Cambridge in 1980.  For most of that time, its artistic director was Robert Brustein who was at once conservative and experimental in his tastes.   Under his helm, the ART presented classics old and modern, generally those familiar to his public, as well as the occasional new work.  Debut plays were often relegated to a second stage where their performances were given lower production values.  On the main stage, Ibsen, Shaw, Pirandello, Strindberg, Beckett and other stalwarts of the modern drama anthology reigned supreme.  Shakespeare and Molière were the most frequent representatives of the older classical repertoire.

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