Opening the Curtain

It's been part of the drill for centuries for directors to stage Shakespeare in exotic locales and different time periods. As You Like It in the Civil War, A Midsummer in a disco, Orson Welles' MacBeth in Harlem. In a way, Shakespeare himself got the ball rolling by setting his plays in foreign lands...

You sit down to see Jane Anderson's new play The Escort. The lights go down, a luscious red curtain opens and there is a beautiful, buxom naked woman center stage...

Theater is so damn...ephemeral...We can still experience a Michelangelo sculpture, still read James Joyce, but an ancient Greek tragedy performed by ancient Greeks...

On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath turned her gas oven on and opened the door. She carefully placed wet rags under the door to the kitchen so the fumes wouldn't seep into the next room where her one year old son and two-year-old daughter were sleeping. Then she placed her head in the oven and waited to die. What was going through her mind at that moment?

There's a lot of Tennessee Williams in Los Angeles right now.  The great Southern playwright would be 100 this week and as a posthumous birthday celebration just about every theater in town is trotting out a production...

So the Greeks, well Aristotle really, argued that one of the reasons to go to the theater was to experience catharsis, literally, a kind of emotional purging or cleansing. The idea was that you'd go to the theater and get so wrapped up in the characters lives, so involved in the emotions, the actions, the "pitiable and fearful incidents" that you'd get all worked up, just like the characters, and then at the climactic moment you'd have a little emotional orgasm of sorts that would release you of the fear or pity in your life. And you'd leave the theater refreshed and ready for another day...

During Argentina's "dirty war" in the 1970's, the state imprisoned dissidents and other undesirables, including many artists. For some, their treatment was extreme. They were kept in solitary confinement. Their only chance to interact with other human beings was an hour each Sunday. The prisoners were allowed to sit four to a table. As long as they sat and kept their hands on the table, they were allowed to talk; if they stood up, they could be shot. With this treatment the regime hoped to break their spirits...but amazingly, on their Sunday meetings, they made theatre...

It’s not politically correct for a theater person to say that they hate Tennessee Williams. Well “hate” might be a little strong, but l certainly wasn’t the first person in line to sit through another gloriously languorous production of “The Glass Menagerie.”

The heart of Moises Kaufman’s new play “33 Variations” comes about 2/3 of the way through. The audience finds themselves alone with Beethoven and his music. To the side of the stage is a pianist beginning to play Beethoven’s Variation #32 on a grand piano.

Take a beautiful, sexually liberated female archetype. Mix in some macho dialogue filled with wit and innuendo. Add a dash of gratuitous nudity and play it with gusto...but mostly for laughs. Recipe for a great evening of theater? You'd think....