Arin Arbus

,

Waiting for Godot

,
Waiting for Godot

When Samuel Beckett’s own production of Waiting for Godot—in German—toured to London’s Royal Court theater in 1976, Guardian critic Michael Billington noted that the actors playing Estragon and Vladimir were “physical and temperamental opposites.” Vladimir was huge and ungainly; Estragon was “short legged, crab-gaited … and moonfaced.” In Arin Arbus’s strong production of Beckett’s despairing modernist masterpiece, Paul Sparks and Michael Shannon aren’t so physically distinct, but their individual temperaments land where they need to.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

The Merchant of Venice

, ,
The Merchant of Venice

When most people think of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, it's Shylock who springs to mind, not the titular merchant. As a Jew in a Christian city-state, Shylock is an outsider; as a moneylender in an economy that reviles usury, he’s a pariah. Director Arin Arbus has chosen John Douglas Thompson, one of the most accomplished classical actors of his generation, as Shylock in her modern-dress production at Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA). Thompson, reportedly the first Black actor to play Shylock professionally in New York, finds music even in the most acidic passages of the Bard’s rhetoric; his nuanced performance explodes at crucial points, with moral indignation outstripping self-pity.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

The Winter’s Tale

,
The Winter’s Tale

It’s a truism that William Shakespeare’s tragicomedy The Winter’s Tale divides into two distinct parts. In the first, Leontes, king of Sicilia, suspects his queen, Hermione, of adultery with his friend Polixenes, king of Bohemia, who has been spending a long sojourn with them but who is leaving for his home country immediately. The biggest hurdle for actors playing Leontes is to make his sudden jealousy credible. “The part is one of the hardest ever written,” Margaret Webster noted in Shakespeare Without Tears: “with almost no preparation, the emotion of it is at flood height.”

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

The Skin of Our Teeth

, ,
The Skin of Our Teeth

Thornton Wilder is best remembered as the author of Our Town and The Matchmaker, the basis for the musical Hello, Dolly! But his third great play, The Skin of Our Teeth, directed by Elia Kazan in 1943, won the Pulitzer Prize, yet the tragicomedy is more spoken about than seen, perhaps because its demands are formidable. Wilder, a great experimentalist, uses every trick in the book to chart the survival of mankind, in the persons of the Antrobus family of Excelsior, N.J., through the Ice Age, the Flood, untold wars and starving refugees.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post