All the world's a stage Archives - Page 21 of 30 - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

Significant Other: Rising Playwright’s New Comedy

By Jane Baldwin | September 13, 2016

Photo: Justin Saglio

Playwright Joshua Harmon first came to notice with his highly successful biting comedy Bad Jews, in which family members fight tooth and nail. His new piece, the simpler Significant Other, presented by Boston’s SpeakEasy Company, focuses on the egocentric, yet generous; impulsive, but wary and obsessive Jordan Berman played by the talented Greg Maraio. Jordan, a gay New Yorker, socializes with his best friends, Kiki (Sarah Elizabeth Bedard), Vanessa (Kris Sidberry), and Laura (Jordan Clark) all professional women of different ethnicities, approximately his age. They go out for dinner, drink, confide in each other, joke, and talk and talk. The women offer him advice. Although they are all in their late twenties, their lives have an adolescent quality.

At the opening as Jordan dances on with the women in a routine reminiscent of an old musical comedy film that sets the playful mood of the friendship. The dance, repeated several times during the show, reflects Jordan’s fantasy life in which he is the main figure, indispensable to each woman. However, his life begins to feel empty as one by one they acquire boyfriends and begin to think of marriage and children. In one of his despairing moments, he laments that he is twenty-nine years old and has never been told he was loved.

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Des Ruines de Jean-Luc Raharimanana. Le théâtre malgache brille!

By Alvina Ruprecht | September 6, 2016

Des Ruines de Jean Luc Raharimanana, mise en scène de Thierry Bedard.

Ce puissant monologue du poète malgache, Jean-Luc Raharimanana, déjà connu pour Les Cauchemars du Gecko présenté à Avignon est une révélation pour le public. Grâce à la transformation de l’acteur congolais Phil Darwin Nianga, connu jusqu’alors comme humoriste et roi du « stand up ».
Un jour, Thierry Bedard, a remarqué la « folie » de cet acteur pendant un de ses spectacles, et a compris que l’humour ravageur de cet homme occultait des dons d’un grand tragédien. Bedard ne s’était pas trompé . Le résultat: une rencontre entre le poème de Raharimanana, le jeu bouleversant de Nianga et le regard très nuancé d’un remarquable directeur d’acteurs et d’un adaptateur de textes à la scène. L’ensemble de cette petite équipe produit un spectacle dont la force humaine, poétique et artistique, dépasse le cadre habituel d’une expérience théâtrale et nous renvoie à la théâtralisation d’une pensée quasi métaphysique autour des conséquences de la colonisation en Afrique. …

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Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education at the American Repertory Theatre.

By Jane Baldwin | August 29, 2016

Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education – Learning from Anna Deavere Smith. Directed by Leonard Foglia .

Photo: Evgenia Eliseeva

This production, premiering at Cambridge’s American Repertory Theatre, while it stands alone as a work of art, is the latest piece in Anna Deavere Smith’s long-term project “On the Road: A Search for American Character.” Three of her earlier works have played at the A.R.T. Fires in the Mirror dealt with the Crown Heights riots in which two minority groups, Blacks and Hasidic Jews turned against each other following an automobile accident in which the Jewish religious leader struck two black children, killing one and injuring the other. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 revolved around the violent events that followed the acquittal of the white police officers who had brutally beaten Rodney King, a black man. Let Me Down Easy, although political in that it addresses health care in the US and was created in the midst of the long hard fight to extend government aid to those unable to pay for private insurance, also recounted tales of athletes on drugs, and focused more on stories of celebrities than is her wont.

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Cuisine and Confessions: A New Take on Dinner Theatre by Les Sept Doigts de la Main

By Jane Baldwin | July 17, 2016

Photo Alexandre Galliez. Performer Anna Kichtchenko

Boston welcomes back Les Sept Doigts de la Main (the Seven Fingers of the Hand) in their latest production Cuisine and Confessions, the fourth circus show that the company has brought to ArtsEmerson. The seven fingers (as the performers are referred to) have grown to nine for their current production. Cuisine and Confessions, like their earlier works, combines acrobatics, dance, song, storytelling, juggling, aerial silks, and occasional live music. Most of the Cuisine and Confessions performers trained at Montreal’s National Circus School, which gives a particular unity to their style.

As often the case in contemporary theatre, the immersive show tries to break down the barriers between performers and audience. At the opening, some of the artists play catch with the spectators using props such as balls and eggs, while other artists approach a few spectators to ask if they would like to participate. Those who agree are brought on stage at various junctures, perhaps fed a bit of food, get a few laughs, and return to their seats.

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Temporada de Teatro Latinoamericano y Caribeño Mayo Teatral 2016

By Alvina Ruprecht | June 28, 2016

Marco Vidal en Mendoza (Los Colochos de Mexico). Vivian Martinez y los colegas de la Casa de las Americas

Patricia Ariza de la Candelaria, Colombia. (Camilo). Photos: Alvina Ruprecht.

Ce Mayo teatral (2016) fut à la fois l’ouverture, par le théâtre, vers une nouvelle vision des Amériques et un voyage vers le passé. C’était avec beaucoup d’émotion que j’ai revu Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Président de la Casa des las Americas, monter sur la tribune, accueillir le public alors que dans les années 1970, nous avons reçu Dr. Retamar à Ottawa en tant qu’invité de l’Association canadienne de Littérature comparée à l’Université Carleton. (Ottawa). Maintenant, revoir ce vénérable monsieur sur la scène chez lui m’a fait un coup de nostalgie très forte.

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Festival Mayo Teatral_ Habana XVI . Triunfadela, notre UBU cubain!

By Alvina Ruprecht | June 22, 2016

Triunfadela, conception et mise en scène de Nelda Castillo, présenté à La Havane.

Photo: Ernesto Manuel Loupez. Comédienne: Mariela Brito.

Triunfadela ou la montée d’un Ubu cubain
L’incorrigible Nelda Castillo, cette artiste cubaine, qui a fondé la troupe El Ciervo Encantado, veut produire une réflexion sur les rapports entre l’art, l’histoire de son pays, les idées de l’ethnologue Fernando Ortiz, et les questions relatives au colonialisme et aux guerres de libération. …

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Festival TransAmérique: Go Down Moses de Romeo Castellucci, un parabole énigmatique de la civilisation humaine.

By Alvina Ruprecht | June 7, 2016

Photo: courtesy of the Festival TransAmérique

Go Down Moses, écrit, conçu et mis en scène par Roméo Castellucci. Une production de la Sociètas Raffaello Sanzio.

Toujours attiré par les textes fondateurs de la civilisation judéo-chrétienne, Castellucci a choisi le prophète Moïse, figure centrale de l’Ancien Testament, pour donner l’impulsion créatrice à sa réflexion sur les diverses manières d’appréhender les rapports entre les êtres humains.

Associée à la libération des opprimés, qu’ils soient des esclaves juifs en Égypte à l’époque biblique ou des esclaves africains dans le nouveau monde (la source, célèbre negro-spiritual etats-unien, est mise en évidence dans le titre), la figure de Moïse ouvre toutes les possibilités culturelles, historiques, religieuses, philosophiques et iconographiques pour structurer un événement dans un espace libéré de la matérialité contraignante de la scène. Ainsi, on dirait qu’il souhaite rassembler un bilan des activités culturelles en s’ouvrant à toutes les époques et toutes les formes de création: la culture populaire, des récits télévisuels, des enquêtes policières, des aventures spaciales, une intermédialité cinéma-théâtre, et même des origines de la tragédie grecque (Eschyle) dont l’Orestea, una commedia organica, présenté par Castellucci au FTA en 1997, était déjà l’exemple le plus troublant.

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Festival TransAmérique – the Italian shows: Reality and Ce ne andiamo per non darvi altre preoccupazioni

By Capital Critics Circle | June 6, 2016

Photo: Reality by Silvia Gelli. Guest reviewer Martin Morrow (Globe and Mail, CBC )

Produced by A.D.Written, directed and performed by Daria Deflorian and Antonio Tagliarini. Presented by Festival TransAmériques

The morning after seeing Reality and Ce ne andiamo per non darvi altre preoccupazioni, two works by Italy’s Daria Deflorian and Antonio Tagliarini at this year’s Festival TransAmériques in Montreal, I bumped into the festival’s artistic director, Martin Faucher, at the popular Pikolo espresso bar near Place des Arts.

As we waited for our coffees, we shared our similar thoughts on the two shows – how they were full of warmth and intimacy, and enticing in their apparent lack of artifice and their direct engagement with the audience. I called them post-theatre. Faucher, perhaps more accurately, referred to them as post-Pirandellian. After all, Deflorian and Tagliarini go beyond their great Italian forerunner, Luigi Pirandello, in turning the creative process into the play itself.

Reality begins with Deflorian and Tagliarini taking turns trying to act out the death by heart attack of an elderly woman on the street – each absurd attempt showing just how difficult it is to pin down that elusive quality, “realism.” And the woman whose demise they are trying to imagine is Janina Turek, a prolific diarist from Krakow, Poland, who had a magnificent obsession with the real.

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Festival TransAmérique: Une île flottante /Das Weisse vom Ei (Floating Island/Egg White), a “bizarre riff” of an uproarously funny French farce.

By Capital Critics Circle | June 3, 2016

Guest reviewer Martin Morrow. (Globe and Mail, CBC)

Photo: Simon Halström. Une île flottante, produced by Theater Basel and Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne. Directed by Christoph Marthaler. Adapted from La Poudre aux yeux by Eugène Labiche

Montreal’s Festival TransAmériques, that showcase of the daring and the avant garde, opened its 10th edition last week with a classic French farce.

But wait for it: this was a French farce as deconstructed by Christoph Marthaler, the celebrated Swiss director who turned the Broadway musical on its ear a few years ago with his Meine Faire Dame, ein Sprachlabor – a bizarre riff on Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady, set in a language lab. So his new touring production, Une île flottante/Das Weisse vom Ei (Floating Island/Egg White), which kicked off the FTA at Place des Arts, is no traditional slice of boulevard theatre – although, like the best farces, it’s uproariously funny.

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In the Body of the World: A View of Eve Ensler’s World

By Jane Baldwin | May 23, 2016

In the Body of the World

Written and performed by Eve Ensler

American Repertory Theater

Eve Ensler, best known for her play The Vagina Monologues is, in addition to being a writer and actress, a social activist who has devoted her life and work to battling sexual violence against the female body worldwide. She has visited sixty countries in her efforts to help and empower women. Her latest piece, a one-woman show In the Body of the World, adapted from Ensler’s eponymous memoir, is being premiered at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The play tells stories of female anguish as experienced by Eve Ensler and contemporary Congolese women. It attempts to intertwine Ensler’s experience of cancer with the atrocities committed against women’s bodies in the Congo’s civil war. However, it focuses far more on the details of Ensler’s life with the Congo serving to bookend the piece. Eve Ensler narrates; she plays no other characters. …

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