On Stage

SAUVAGE, LEO

On Stage AVANT-GARDE ANTITHESIS BY LEO SAUVAGE Broadway's Circle in the Square Theater has launched its 35 th Anniversary Season with a roller-skating extravaganza by director Andrei Serban. It...

...So are the imag-inativecostumes and all of the performers, individually and as members of the ensemble...
...He told an interviewer shortly before the Broadway opening: "For all the comic hijinks, it is at bottom a seriously political play...
...Five years later, onjuly 14,1789, the people of Paris took the Bastille...
...During 12 of his Polish years Stoss worked on the retable of the Church of Our Lady in Cracow, which brought him immortality...
...Indeed, it is a miracle that Mary Elizabeth Mas-trantonio nevertheless succeeds in being Beaumarchais' Suzanne, and that Anthony Heald can bring some of the playwright's dramatic bitterness to Figaro' s accusatory monologue while compelled to twist and sway on a swing...
...A handsome rascal who took his title from a small property owned by the first of his three wives, Beaumarchais possessed multiple talents...
...Adapter Nelson at least seems aware that there is a deeper meaning to the fun...
...There certainly is nothing wrong with treating the work as a farce...
...Here they will suffer their last defeat, beneath a torn black flag brandished by the cabaret whore, now the angel of death...
...called it" a particularly graceful choice, because the 18th-century comedy is more than a classic item of the French stage...
...Yet if that implies someone who wishes to display his originality at all costs, it fits Serban better than Beaumarchais...
...The crates are marked: "Cricot 2 Theater...
...DieKunst-lersollen krepieren...
...I don't know whether Serban used a stopwatch during rehearsals...
...What is worse, they made others laugh...
...The play is being exploited to present a director...
...They tumble and topple forward to martial music while maintaining the pace of a military march...
...One day they will regret it...
...Because of the expressive contrasts he introduced into his Gothic realism, some historians have described his art as "theatrical...
...Therestof Cricot2plays itself, atour-ing company presenting a repertoire built on historical and subjective reminiscences, on artistic and philosophical allegories...
...They are not part of a play whose story is built on sentences...
...Written in 1778, theplaywas rejected by the royal censor...
...And when Serban allows us to divert our attention from his antics we hear a few lines that sound likeBeau-marchais—albeitinprosaicand vulgar, rather than witty, English...
...As a character, he is listed among the dramatispersonae under his Polish and his German names...
...Kantor, whose theatrical creations introduce Gothic realism into 20th-century surrealism, makes Stoss both a character in and the essential symbol of Let the artists die...
...Since the performers in the Circle in the Square show attributed to Beaumarchais are virtually reduced to animated dummies, it would be unfair to judge them as actors and actresses...
...The words and the songs we heard were in Polish, yet the company's intonations and movements made them easy to follow...
...He did not like the all-powerful tyranny of the kings, symbolized by the stone walls of the Bastille, and he resented the wrongs done to the people, especially—and this, perhaps, was the main stimulus for his often daring satire—to pretty girls...
...it is also a play which, in its famous celebration of democratic virtues, represents an everlasting bond between its country and ours.' While ready to appropriate some of their privileges, Beaumarchais despised the nobility and hated the ancien regime they belonged to...
...The name Tadeusz Kantor figures in the cast listing, too, as "a real person, the Prime Mover...
...To further stress the theatrical nature of the enterprise, the crates used to transport the costumes and the accessories of the company, initially arranged in the back of the playing space as part of the setting, are pushed forward to form the base of the barricade...
...Beaumarchais certified it as such with his subtitle, La folle journee ("The Mad Day...
...Tadeusz Kantor' s acknowledged main inspiration is the sculptor Veit Stoss...
...It was an immediate success...
...In a strange way he reminds one of Jean Moulin, the French Resistance leader tortured to death by Klaus Barbie...
...Jacques Copeau once observed that a farce has to run as precisely as a Swiss watch...
...Tadeusz Kantor, moreover, is not afraid to incorporate real music into his brilliant dramatic offering...
...He was an adventurer without too many scruples but with a certain sense of fairness...
...The word krepieren, in German slang, is much harsher than "to die...
...The author was not showing of f. His clever repartees and tricky situations expressed moods, feelings and ideas which were part of the Enlightenment that marked the end of an era and announced the beginning of a new one...
...The choreography is perfect...
...Dominating them is a thin, small general astride an enormous articulated skeleton of a horse...
...But the people who die may already have stopped living, or may still be alive after an old, unblinking doctor has felt their pulse and pronounced them dead in German, French and Polish...
...When the man with a scarf around his neck rises and falls inside a small cubicle, he sings a popular tango in harmoniously divided segments .The sculptor of Cracow's Church of Our Lady also dances the tango with the erotically undressed cabaret whore...
...When the Jean-Louis Barrault/Mad-eleine Renaud Company opened its 1964 visit at New York's City Center with the work as written, Richard Watts Jr...
...Butamadfarce needs even more theatrical simplicity and discipline than a regular comedy...
...It must have been to regulate the vehicles of his "avant-gardism"— roller skates, skateboards and a modern wheelchair for Bazile...
...It could even be seen as a mystical epos in which every physical sequence carries a metaphysical shadow...
...That was the title of the Nuremberg performances...
...Only after years of scheming and campaigning by Beaumarchais was it finally presented at the Comedie-Frangaise on April 27,1784...
...Elements of the retable of the Church of Our Lady are transformed into instruments of torture that the victims, having been put to death on them, carry in a parade and then place in a pile to help erect a barricade...
...Thus, the key to his presence is thedesireto emphasize that what we are witnessing is theater...
...In any case, it was brilliant, and we were in the presence of an important theatrical event...
...Mostly in this production, though, the director is not presenting a play...
...In addition to his professional expertise as a watchmaker, taught to him by his father, these included harp playing, influence peddling, womanizing, arms smuggling, and, on two great occasions, writing witty, politically unorthodox comedies for the theater...
...He transferred the action to Spain, and he wrote a Preface for the printed text where he declared the play was merely a humorous trifle:" It is nothing more than the story of a Spanish nobleman who wants to have his wife's maid the night before she marries his valet, but whose efforts are spoiled by his wife, the maid and the valet...
...As a symbol, Stoss-Stwosz is Death...
...It would be superficially amusing if it did not pretend to be an avant-garde version of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beau-marchais' Le Manage de Figaro...
...It is a highly stylized satire with tragic undertones, or a stylized tragedy punctuated by black humor and sardonically choreographed into pantomime...
...The leitmotif is provided by repeated parades of white-faced, broken down soldiers in angular Polish uniforms...
...The English title of the recent work, first shown in Nuremberg as an homage to a 15th-century sculptor, is Let the artists die...
...none of the many noblemen who laughed and applauded recognized themselves in Count Almaviva...
...When the doctor checking the pulse of the various participants grabs his wrist too, he lets him do so passively, as if to avoid making a scene, but thegestureis not meaningless...
...He appears wearing a dark suit, a dark hat with the brim turned down, and a scarf that covers part of his face to hide the disfigurement...
...If he did, it was not to sharpen and emphasize the impact of the author's subversive intentions...
...It is a pity that Tadeusz Kantor and his Cricot 2 Theater only visited New York for a short time...
...Modestly, or for lack of a better word, the Playbill caWedit "arevue...
...There is no narrative yet there obviously is a script, and it is strictly adhered to by the performers under the direct supervision of Kantor, who stands or sits on the sideline...
...Happily , the return of Tadeusz Kantor's Polish company, Cricot 2, for a limited stay at Ellen Stewart's La Mama saved the much misused term "avant-garde" from becoming utterly meaningless—or abhorrent—in the theater this season...
...Unfortunately, even if there had been a copyright law at the time of his death in 1799, it would no longer protect us in 1985 from The Marriage of Figaro adapted by Richard Nelson and rolled over by Andrei Serban...
...And that's about all that survives in the Circle "revival...
...Moulin always wore a scarf in front of his neck to hide the scar left when he had tried to cut his throat during an earlier arrest...
...Born in Cracow and faithful to its hometown, although probably more at home now in Italy, Germany or France, the superb ensemble gave us a little surrealist masterpiece called Wielopole Wielpole three years ago...
...He is "the author" being played by several others who, the Playbill tells us, are describing him and his death...
...They include an old woman called Mum, a hanged man, a card-playing pimp, an erotically undressed cabaret whore, a man who cannot stop washing his feet, and a woman who keeps counting the beads of her rosary behind a mobile bedside table equipped with a prayer stool...
...Marriage is a carriage for Andrei Serban's gimmickry...
...Beaumarchais made two concessions to the censor...
...If the artists are left to croak, however, their Polish cannot be confused with the ugly croaking sounds sometimes heard at the same La Mama in an aggressive exhibition of antitheater...
...He was born near Nuremberg about 1438, spent 19 years of his adult life in Cracow where he was known as Wit Stwosz, returned to Nuremberg in 1496, was painfully disfigured early in the following century by order of the City Council as "punishment for fraud," and nonetheless went on sculpting as well as engraving until he died in 1533 at roughly age 95...
...One aristocratic lady however, wrote to a friend: "They laughed at their own expense...
...Although few who stormed the prison had seen LeMariage de Figaro, some of its best lines had become popular street slogans, and in France they still are...
...In fact, Let the artists die isn't a play in the conventional sense of the word...
...It underlines his belonging to the cast...
...Today he might be called a maverick...
...But they will come back, they must come back...

Vol. 68 • October 1985 • No. 14


 
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