Days of Rage

Steven Levenson’s fast-paced and hilarious play, Days of Rage, opens in October 1969. America is riven. The war in Vietnam has taken more than 30,000 American lives. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy have been assassinated. Twenty thousand mostly young people turned out to protest the war in Vietnam at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and police are assigned to contain and control the crowd at all costs. Eight of the protesters, later known as the Chicago Eight, were put on trial in late August 1969. Word goes out to bus protesters to the trial. Both the protesters and the Chicago Eight see the case as a way to put the nation itself, its racism and unjust war, on trial. Levenson’s powerful play focuses a sharp gaze at politics and the hidden volatility that can tip over into violence and the spilling of blood.

“Levenson writes with great clarity about the fundamental unclarity of the human situation. Several times Jenny talks in startling detail about the effects of napalm and the Vietnamese children it has killed. It is the spring of her idealism and of her willingness to resort to violence. Hal has no satisfying response to her.”

The play, adventurously directed by Trip Cullman, opens with a crash of music and blaring lights that subside quickly, leaving the audience facing the interior of a house: a living room below and bedroom above. It is in this house that the intimate political and personal saga of “the collective” unfolds. Spence, Jenny and Quinn (Mike Fest, Lauren Patten, and Odessa Young, respectively) have quit school to join the movement and, with two more of their friends, created “the collective.” The loud period music of Darron West’s brilliant sound design punctuates the short scenes capturing the heady mix of weed, idealism, radical politics and youth that fills the house.

For those old enough to remember, the mix is pitch-perfect. These are days of free love, of radical politics, of revolution, and of rejecting parents, school, and, most passionately of all, the war in Vietnam. Spence has a volume of Lenin that he reads. As members of the collective, the three share all decisions (money) and responsibilities (dishes). Even their bodies are on a rotating schedule: “We share everything,” Spence explains to Peggy. “Why should our bodies be any different?"

The timing and ensemble work of the actors is flawless. Spence, Jenny and Quinn spend their days fruitlessly trying to sign people up for free rides to Chicago for the protest. The story takes off with two events. Hal (J. Alphonse Nicholson), whose brother is fighting in Vietnam, is a gentle black man who works for a living and whose quiet attention stirs Jenny into life and into a reevaluation of that life as a romance buds. How will Hal’s presence in Jenny’s life play out in a collective in which everything is shared?

Lauren Patten (left) is Jenny and J. Alphonse Nicholson is Hal in Steve Levenson’s Days of Rage. Top: Tavi Gevinson (left) plays outsider Peggy, and Odessa Young is Quinn. Photographs by Joan Marcus.

At the same time, a wacky outsider, Peggy (Tavi Gevinson), desperate for a place to crash even with $2,000 in her pocket, swears allegiance to the Revolution and worms her way into the group. It is Peggy who first insists she is being followed by the FBI. It is Peggy who will try to get the collective to expel Jenny, and it is she who will supply Spence with a gun, egg him on to use it, and push the collective over the edge. This is the edge that Levenson sets out to explore, the cocktail that will or will not explode into violence.        

Levenson writes with great clarity about the fundamental unclarity of the human situation. Several times Jenny talks in startling detail about the effects of napalm and the Vietnamese children it has killed. It is the spring of her idealism and of her willingness to resort to violence. Hal has no satisfying response to her. Are there times in which violence makes sense? But shattering news arrives: two friends have accidentally blown themselves up in an attempt to bomb a Detroit bank as an act of political protest. Hal points out that innocent workers in the bank, whose only “crime” is that they were trying to make a living, would have been killed if they had succeeded. It is now Jenny and her friends who are silent. Clearly, this violent protest cannot be the answer, either.     

There is a second instance in which a bomb fails to explode—in a story Jenny shares with Hal. They are spooky moments, in which life appears to be imitating art since this play was already in previews when the country was startled by pipe bombs sent to prominent Democrats which have also not exploded. The year 1969 is a window into our fraught times, and Levenson uses it just as Arthur Miller used the Salem witch trials to focus his unsparing gaze on the McCarthy years in The Crucible.  

Days of Rage is playing through Nov. 25 at the 2nd Stage (305 West 43rd St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday–Thursday and at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday. Tickets from $40. For tickets and information, call (212) 246-4422 or visit 2st.com.

Looking for God and Love

Serious pianists love to study the great composers in order to explore and channel the music they are to perform. Hershey Felder, the writer and star of the solo show Maestro, is a serious pianist and composer in his own right. He is also a gifted and highly successful singer, director, and producer. His one-man show is the natural rumination of one serious musician about another.

Maestro is the story of the larger-than-life phenomenon that was Leonard Bernstein: conductor of the celebrated New York Philharmonic and orchestras worldwide; the second most performed classical composer in the United States, who also wrote the scores for the hit West Side Story and other Broadway shows; the creator of 53 Young People’s Concerts and proselytizer on behalf of the classical music tradition to the millions he reached on TV and in lectures all over the world. In this and other plays, Felder has created a piece of biographical theater. His one-man plays about Gershwin, Chopin, Beethoven, Liszt, Irving Berlin, and now Bernstein, use story, song, and music to probe the lives of great musicians and deepen our understanding of music itself.

Bernstein’s overarching passion was to compose. In Lenny’s voice, Felder explains what lies behind the works he composes: “and in every one of these pieces, I am busy looking for God. And for love. Because as composers, that’s what we’re always doing.” This desire, the desire to compose and all it encompasses, is the spine of Felder’s play. Will Bernstein find God? Will he find love? Will he write the great works he so badly wants to write?

Felder takes on Lenny, the controversies about his life and his music, and looks for the truth behind the noise of his fame. He shows us a man whose betrayal of his marriage and loss of his wife to cancer upended his life. And he shows us a man who, for all of his achievements as a composer, was never embraced by the classical composing establishment, which rigidly favored atonalism. Bernstein not only believed that tonality and melody were at the heart of all great classical music, he wrote successful musicals; brought classical impulses into his popular music; brought popular idioms into his serious classical compositions; and was just too populist in every way to win the seal of approval of that elite club whose tenets he rejected. He paid a heavy price.

Beautifully directed by Joel Zwick, the work uses projection and lighting (Christopher Ashe) as well as audio (Eric Carstensen) in striking, even brilliant ways. Does Felder do justice to Bernstein? Do we know the man more deeply after the play than we did before? These are questions that theatergoers will answer for themselves. But in bringing us a character whose passion and achievements were in music, Felder’s own musicianship, his teaching moments riffing on music that occur throughout the play, and his prowess at the keyboard, bring us more deeply into the soul of Bernstein than this genre might have otherwise permitted.

A solo show is a special feat for any actor. Maestro runs one hour and 45 minutes and includes challenging work at the keyboard, some of it while also singing or speaking. At the same time, is it mean-spirited to say there is a bit too much West Side Story and that, if the final song were cut, the play would end on the more tragic note intended by Felder, without sentimentality? Interestingly, as a baritone, Felder sings in a soft and lilting popular style and also in a steelier, more trained classical style, sometimes combining both, just as Bernstein was forever migrating from one style to the next in unexpected ways. Vocally this usually works—but not always.

Did Bernstein find God and love in his composing and in his life? In the most powerful moment at the end of the play—better experienced than described here—Bernstein combatively turns and asks questions of the audience. Then he recites a poem Bernstein wrote in which he sums up how he views his life in the face of his approaching death. Did Bernstein find God and love in his composing? No, Felder says, not in Bernstein’s eyes. And yes, Felder says, in the eyes and hearts of all of us who listen to his story and, even more important, to the maverick genius and passionate heart of the music that beats beneath it.

Maestro runs through Oct. 23 at 59E59 Theaters (59 E. 59th St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tues.–Thurs. and at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. (Additional performances are at 2 p.m. Sept. 29 and Oct. 13. There are no performances on Sept. 24 or Oct. 11 or at 7 p.m. Oct. 2.) Tickets are $25–$70. For more information, call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200 or visit www.59e59.org.

A Civic Jewel—and Free!

There is something appropriate about offering Shakespeare for free in the parks of New York City. Like the great rivers and mountains of the earth or the stars and planetary system—which charge no admission for us to admire them—Shakespeare is a force of Nature that belongs to us all.

Artistic Director Stephen Burdman has made it the mission of the New York Classical Theatre to bring free Shakespeare productions to various parks during the summer: following this year’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the late romance The Winter’s Tale, brilliantly conceived, acted, and deeply moving, to boot. 

The Winter’s Tale, first performed 405 years ago in 1611, is about the fallout of a king’s jealousy when the ruler, Leontes, wrongly imagines that his devoted wife, Hermione, has consorted with his best friend, King Polixenes, and that the child she is to bear him is not his. Only after the death of Leontes’ young son and sole heir, Mamillius (Peyton Lusk is delightful in the role), followed by the death of his faithful queen, does the king awaken from his madness and see his foul crimes for what they are.

Here is a feast of self-deception, delusion and jealousy for Shakespeare to plumb in all of the pity and horror his majestic language can inspire before the play resolves, after an improbable leap of 16 years in time, on happier notes: the reunion of the two friends, Leontes and Polixenes; the forthcoming marriage of their children, Florizel and Perdita; and most ridiculously wondrous of all, the revelation that the statue of the long-dead queen is really a living and breathing Hermione, now returned to the bosom of her husband and family. If the question is whether or to what extent a particular performance of The Winter’s Tale allows the audience to utterly suspend their disbelief when confronted by such leaps in time and “happy” endings, the production did very well indeed.

Brad Fraizer in his beautifully acted role as Leontes carries the emotional sweep of the play from his increasingly insane jealousy to the extremes and horror of recognition of his crimes, and from there to the reconciliations wrought by Time and Chance. It is a challenging role.

David Heron as his beloved childhood friend, King Polixenes, is commanding and passionate in his role. Hermione, so profoundly wronged by her husband, is portrayed by Mairin Lee with a queenly elegance, dignity and sensitivity. Mark August, who plays the clown, Autolycus, is extraordinary and deserves special mention for his comic brilliance and gifts. So, too, does the stirring performance of Lisa Tharp as Paulina, maid in waiting to the Queen, whose impassioned rebuke to Leontes for his treatment of his wife is heart-piercing. For all of the loveliness of the outdoor setting, it also places special demands in clearly projecting Shakespeare’s language, to which the cast rose magnificently.  

As the play moves from Act II to Act III, the audience also moves—from Clinton Castle (Leontes’ court in Sicilia) to a lawn overlooking the Hudson River (the shores of Bohemia). Burdman calls this his “panoramic” technique, a method by which the audience is less a witness to the actions before it than at the center of those actions. It is as if the viewers were really accompanying the courtier Antigonus, sent by the mad Leontes to abandon his own newborn daughter, Perdita. Over the Hudson, just in front of the audience, is a real cloud-flecked sky with real birdsong mixing with the sounds of the city in the background. Scene iii of the next act takes place on a different lawn (another location in Bohemia) to which the actors, again, lead the audience. The scene is one of a sheep shearing and, as evening gathers, the audience sits amid trees and grass exactly as they might at a real sheep shearing.

In Burdman’s “panoramic” approach, the entire park is our stage. There are no sets. Scenes are acted in different areas of the park with the audience sitting on the ground or grass, and the staff, in the first row of the audience, shining flashlights on the characters once it has become dark. Shakespeare’s language and his dramatic exploration of human character and heart fill the entirety of the space with no theatrical paraphernalia to draw off attention. And the effect is simply stunning, as less proves so much more! There is no lovelier way to spend an evening than to allow Shakespeare’s magic to sizzle and cast a net over you and over the city itself. 

Meet outside Castle Clinton in Battery Park at 7 p.m. nightly (except Thursdays) through Aug. 7 (via 1 train to South Ferry or the 4/5 to Bowling Green). The Winter’s Tale will then move to Brooklyn Bridge Park from Aug. 9-14 (take F train to York, 2/3 to Clark or A/C to High), also at 7 p.m. There will be no performance on Aug. 11.

It’s War

The juxtaposition of two masterpieces by two giants of modern theater on opposite sides of the ever more relevant and explosive issue of gender is a New York theatrical event. Theater for a New Audience has paired Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House with the lesser-known The Father, by August Strindberg, a play written partially in response to the Ibsen play.

Director Arin Arbus and her creative team brilliantly use the same actors in similar roles in both plays and configure the theater at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in traverse with the audience on two sides of a fairly narrow but long stage. A Doll’s House, first produced in 1887, follows the 1937 Thornton Wilder adaptation. The Father, written in 1887, boasts a newly commissioned translation of from writer and director David Greig.

Both plays tell the story of a marriage that falls apart when a woman takes action on behalf of a husband or child in a world in which the society upholds male prerogatives. The law denies both women scope of action on critical matters in their lives. In The Father, it would deprive Laura (Maggie Lacey), the wife of Captain Adolf, the title character, of any say in the future of her child. In A Doll’s House, it turns Nora’s saving of her husband Thorwald’s life into a criminal act. What will Laura do when the Captain (John Douglas Thompson), her husband, announces his irrevocable decision to send their daughter away to school to become a teacher when she wants Bertha (Kimber Monroe) to remain home and study art? What will happen to Nora when her forgery of a promissory note on a loan is revealed to him just as, inconveniently, he is about to start a new job as the head of a bank?

In both plays the man is the provider, and the husband complains about his wife’s spending his hard-earned money (no concept of an economic partnership here!). Both women must connive to make their marriages work and get what they want, be it the nibble of a macaroon or the destiny of a child. In both, wives get in the way of their husbands’ careers, Laura in misdirecting her husband’s scientific letters detailing hard-won discoveries, and Nora in forging her father’s signature and potentially placing her husband in a compromised situation at his bank. Is it coincidence that the dramatic turning point of each play depends on an act of male violence? In The Father, Captain Adolf throws a lamp at his wife and the resulting fire is a tour de force of staging by Arbus with Riccardo Hernandez’s scenic design. Matters for the Captain devolve from there. In A Doll’s House, the violence is verbal. Thorwald’s berating of Nora when he feels his career and social standing are threatened fires Nora’s decision to leave the confinement of her “doll’s house.” The overlap of the two plays could hardly be more striking.

But that overlap is indeed the point, and it throws the different human, gender, and theatrical visions of the plays into far sharper relief. A Doll’s House is, of course, not just the dramatic rendering and canny analysis of the woman’s situation in the late 19th century; it is a manifesto that speaks boldly even today. When Nora’s husband, Thorwald, defends himself to his wife, saying, “No man sacrifices his honor even for the woman he loves,” and Nora responds, “Millions of women have done it,” the audience at the Polonsky erupted in applause. With humiliating clarity, Nora comes to understand how living in homes run by men has stunted her growth as a human being. “I’ve been living like a beggar, by performing tricks for you!” she tells Thorwald. “You and my father are responsible. It’s your fault my life has been wasted.” Maggie Lacey is commendable in both wife roles, and does especially well with the lighter shades of Nora’s passionate character.

In The Father, the Captain’s human growth has been stunted too, and in a manner parallel to Nora’s, since it is his profound and early attachments to women, plumbed to extraordinary depths in the play and in the harrowing and magnificent performance by Thompson, that undermine and doom him. Thompson’s performances as the husbands are powerful, but the Strindberg provides him with a role of rare emotional range in which he, along with the audience watching him, absolutely revels. The Father is a cri de coeur on behalf of husbands and breadwinners everywhere and the sacrifices that come with that role. At the heart of this painful play is not a heroic vision of manhood but rather a disturbing vision of male weakness. It is out of weakness that the Captain reaches to the law and social norms of male prerogative to counter the will of his determined wife.

At the same time, staging the plays in repertory works to Strindberg’s advantage. The tight construction of The Father, in which the suspicions his wife plants about whether he is Bertha’s father or not drive the Captain to insanity, makes the Ibsen work feel, at moments, contrived, as when Nora’s friend and foil, Mrs. Linden, makes the shocking decision to allow Thorwald to find the damning letter that will reveal Nora’s forgery. The psychological contradictions and depths of Strindberg’s portrayal of the Captain makes Ibsen’s portrayal of Nora's final resolve to leave her husband and two children appear less powerfully motivated by comparison. 

At the end of A Doll’s House, there is hope beyond the confines of the performance itself. Nora, who was courageous enough to undertake an extraordinary scheme to save a husband’s life, will surely succeed now that she has made the decision to save her own life.  And in the aftermath of battle, there is the possibility of a new woman and new man that will emerge from this process. The same is not true for the more despairing vision of Strindberg, in which the male is fundamentally powerless, and the entire family a rubble of destruction. Tellingly, it is the Captain’s own nanny, Margaret, beautifully played with unexampled tenderness by Laurie Kennedy, who tricks him into the actual straitjacket to which his madness has led him. For the noble Captain, there is no exit. Strindberg’s vision is as dark as Ibsen’s is radical.

Arbus and her marvelous casts invite us to place these plays beside each other and, in so doing, come away with a new understanding, not only of these works, not only of these playwrights, but of ourselves. Can great theater do more?

Theater for a New Audience presents August Strindberg's The Father and Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House in repertory at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center (262 Ashland Place) in Brooklyn through June 12. Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets, call Ovationtix at (866) 811-4111 or visit www.tfana.org.

'Hommage' to an Idiot

Idiot, now at the lovely main space at HERE, is a feast of multimedia effects. With crisscrossed Persian carpets forming aisles that divide the audience into four quarters, video panels above, and heated Oriental rhythms in the background, the story unfolds. How to capture the innocence and depths of the epileptic Prince Lev Myshkin, portrayed by Daniel Kublick, in this theatrical version of and hommage to the great Dostoevsky novel? With a script that focuses on the tempestuous relations of four key characters of the Dostoevsky work; with philosophical riffs; with inventive use of video, light, and sound; with song, dance, gesture and interaction with the audience! This is immersive theater, a specialty at SoHo’s HERE, an award-winning theater organization devoted to the support of new work that cuts across artistic disciplines. Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues was developed at HERE.

If romantic triangles usually involve a triad, the triangle in this case has four corners: the lascivious Parfyon Rogozhin is obsessed by Nastasya Filippovna. Her hand in marriage, however, is also sought by the Prince who is, at the very same time, in love with the vivacious Aglaya Epanchin. The central conflict of the play, then, concerns the Prince’s love for both women.

The fallen, dissolute, but proud Nastasya Filippovna, fetchingly portrayed by Purva Bedi, disdains money (at one point she throws 100,000 rubles of Rogozhin’s money into a fire) and sees through the lies of others no less than the mind-reading Prince himself, who loves her “out of pity.” Lauren Cipoletti plays Aglaya. Also loved by the gentle Prince, and a beauty of good family standing, Aglaya shares much with him, including a great love of children. The blue-eyed, soulful and energetic Prince Myshkin, beautifully performed by Daniel Kublick, is the “idiot” of the title. 

Rogozhin is played with verve and flourish by Merlin Whitehawk. The audience is treated to extremes of passion of the most brutal and delicate varieties; a motif of execution to emphasize the underlying question of life, its purpose and the experience of it; as well as the stormy relations among a virgin-harlot dyad (the female characters), a lecherous drunk, and an invalid Prince who is spiritual and hardly of this world.

This is the third partnering of Robert Lyons (text) and Kristin Marting (director and choreographer) in the adaptation of a work by Dostoevsky. And theirs is a rollicking and “immersive” production, to say the least. The point of immersive theater is to move past the limits of merely “watching” a staged production in order to create an experience that is more active, richer, and, presumably, deeper by “immersing” the audience in multiple theatrical effects. Always, the question must finally be asked, what exactly was accomplished by all of these theatrical goings-on?

There were arresting moments in this production. On several occasions, the sound of the Prince’s speech is engineered so that his words are somewhat muffled and have the distant sound of an echo, brilliantly suggesting the interiority of his spoken thoughts. At another point, the Prince is deeply moving as he wanders among the audience, accosts individual audience members and soliloquizes on the subject of human love, bringing some in his audience to tears.

But, for the most part, inventive use of video, gesture and dance, the dramatic story and interludes of deeper rumination do not, finally, cohere to immerse us in anything more than that spectacle itself. We are entertained but, finally, not enlarged in the course of this production.

It is unfair to require the depth of spiritual exploration and of character that is the greatness of the large and rambling Dostoevsky novel. This is another work entirely, in another genre entirely. The achievement of Dostoevsky cannot be condensed into a mere 75 minutes. But it is not unfair to ask that the heart and soul be moved in the course of those 75 minutes and, given the extremes of human feeling and experience brought into view, moved deeply. That, one would hope, is the real goal of the best work in experimental immersive theater.

Idiot plays through May 21 at HERE Arts Center (145 Sixth Ave.; entrance on Dominick Street). Performances are at 8:30 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Tickets are $25 and can be purchased at www.here.org or by calling (212) 352-3101 or at the HERE Box Office (5 p.m. until curtain on show days).

Steal This Hamlet

The New York Shakespeare Exchange’s Hamlet 10, now playing at the Flamboyán Theater, is a production of rare emotional power and a directorial tour de force. In bringing us a Hamlet played, not by one, but by all ten of its actors, Hamlet is liberated from the very idea of a character as a role played by a single actor. Could there be any convention more fundamental to the theater itself than the notion that a character is played by, and physically embodied by, the actor who plays that character? However interesting the design of the set and skillful the acting, what makes this production significant in the world of the theater in a way that no other recent production can rival, is its upturning of this most unquestioned convention, the identification of one actor with one role.

Ross Williams, the director of this production and the producing artistic director and founder of the New York Shakespeare Exchange, not only distributes the role and lines of Hamlet among all ten of his actors, he ignores gender, age, race and ethnicity entirely in the assigning of roles. Two women play the roles of Polonius and of Rosencrantz. Julie DeLaurier plays a wonderful speechifying and bumbling Polonius and Sarin Monae West, a feisty Rosencrantz. Hamlet’s lines are spoken at times by women and at other times by men of a diverse cast who differ in age, in race, and in ethnicity. Sometimes lines are spoken in unison and sometimes, within a soliloquy perhaps, the lines travel from one actor to the next, from one gender to the next, from one race, ethnicity, and body type to the next.

Hamlet is thus fluid. He is everywhere and nowhere; he is no one and everyone. Much as, in the collective imagination, he has grown over the past centuries to mythic proportions. Hamlet in this production is not a body but a presence, one that physically expands and contracts according to how many actors are speaking his lines at any given moment and where and how the actors are grouped on the “stage.” When all ten actors, some standing up close to the front row of the audience and others further back, spoke the opening section of the all too familiar “To be or not to be,” together but deliberately not in unison, followed by one actor declaiming the speech in its entirety from center stage, the words burst through their familiar containers. One of Shakespeare’s greatest soliloquies had regained an originary power and was newly fierce, fresh, and wrenching in a way we could not have imagined.

Elivia Bovenzi, the costume designer, has dressed the actors in relatively comfortable modern dress. In a brilliant stroke, the scenic designer, Jason Lajka and the director, Williams, dreamt up a stage that consists of a set of boxes, much like oversized children’s blocks, some of them with several steps and some not, that can be pulled apart and rearranged at will. In the opening scene of the play, there is a center stage of these boxes pushed together from which the actors speak. In the wonderful gravedigger’s scene, actor Nathaniel P. Claridad jumps into a turned over box, while the other boxes have been pulled from view.

With so minimalist a set and so multiple, fluid and large a presence of Hamlet himself, the production lifts Shakespeare’s language to a commanding position. And that, is to privilege the beauty, the genius, the poetry and the emotional range of the essential Shakespeare.

Who would have thought that an audience could so “suspend its disbelief” as to go along with and accept this new and wildly imaginative approach to the character of Hamlet. Williams and the New York Shakespeare Exchange have stretched theater conventions and opened our eyes to possibilities within the theater we had not dreamed of. There is no doubt that the theater of the future will steal from Williams’ Hamlet 10!

Hamlet 10 runs until April 9 at the Flamboyán Theater (107 Suffolk St. between Rivington St. and Delancey St.) in Manhattan. Evening performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and matinees are Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets cost $18. To purchase tickets, call 917-428-0065 or visit shakespeareexchange.org.

On Puppets, Music and Race

In standing publicly and personally for the contribution of black spirituals and melodies to the future of American music, 19^th-century European composer Antonín Dvorák took up arms against a sea of racism that did not subside with the ending of the Civil War. The New World Symphony: Dvorák in America, produced by the storied Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre, uses the little-known visit of the composer to our shores only 27 years after the Civil War to take a bold, bracing and exuberant swipe at American racism of the past and its echoes up through our current presidential elections. The production, which combines puppets with human actors, is nothing if not wildly imaginative and, at the same time, deeply serious and grounded in the historical record of Dvorák’s sojourn in the United States. Written and brilliantly directed by Vit Horejs, it is playing at the La Mama Experimental Theatre Club. 

From 1893­-95 the unassuming, prolific and famous Dvorák was the director of the National Conservatory of Music of America, based in New York, a brainchild of the philanthropist Jeanette Meyers Thurber. A woman far ahead of her time, Thurber sought out musical talent among “female, minority, and physically disabled” students, and in 1893—at the height of Jim Crow and of lynchings across the South­—she and Dvorák initiated a tuition-free policy for black students. It was during his residency as director of the school that Dvorák composed arguably his finest and most beloved work, the New World Symphony. Among other pieces written in his “American” period, it was music influenced by the “Negro melodies” Dvorák so deeply admired.

At one point Dvorák remarks that “the future music of this country … must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States.” The statement, like many of the lines in the play, is drawn verbatim from writings by and interviews of Dvorák and contemporaries. While Dvorák’s prescient vision of the development of an American musical idiom within a deeply hostile and racist context is the overpowering theme of the play, the lively portrait of the period, wrapped, as it were, in the candy of broken violin parts, puppets, and theatrical slapstick, includes Prohibition, labor unrest, Tammany Hall, the Haymarket Riots and, importantly, the Columbian World Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893, in which the black Paul Lawrence Dunbar makes his appearance. 

Horejs’s production includes both period and modern costumes at the same time that a fair number of lines of its text also wander from their strict historical period, as when Nazi Reichsminister Josef Goebbels says: “If by jazz we mean Judeo-Negroid music that is based on rhythm and entirely ignores melody, why then we can only keep the lower race responsible….” Another voice later declares, “I am now calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” The connections between racism old and new, and, in fact, Old World and New World, could not be clearer.

In the play, as in life, we see Dvorák take black and Native American talent under his wing: Harry Burleigh and Will Marion Cook, black musicians and teachers who would deeply influence their students and the development of black musical forms, are two who appear in the play. Chief Big Moon from the Hunkpapa Tribe is another student of Dvorák who impressively lectures on arcane language issues on stage. The play ends with music that sweeps from gospel to jazz and to rock. Surely Dvorák’s prognostications about the black musical genius and its centrality for American music proved accurate.

As a composer known for bringing folk themes from his native Bohemia into his music, Dvorák would surely have been pleased to have his life rendered in the theater tradition of puppetry so dear to the hearts of Czechs. Ben Watts made for a Dvorák of boundless energy and verve. The rest of the cast was terrific.

In organizing the script in Dvorák’s actual footsteps rather than around a conflict or obstacle faced by the composer, Horejs perhaps sacrifices dramatic power for his historical purpose. No matter. The fun and slapstick of the production itself, its underlying serious ideas, and the concert quality of the music made up for any weaknesses. James Brandon Lewis on sax, Luke Stewart on bass and Warren Trae Crudup III on drums were simply outstanding. Harlem Lafayette, who played the black musician Harry Burleigh, has the voice of an angel, as does Valois Mickies who played a black female singer. Original music not composed by Dvorák, was composed by James Brandon Lewis.

The Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre production of The New World Symphony: Dvorák in America runs through March 27 at the La Mama Experimental Theater Club, 66 East 4th St. Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Thursday through Saturday; matinees are Sundays at 4 p.m. Tickets are $25. Seniors and students are $20. Ten $10 tickets are available for every performance on a first-come, first -served basis. For tickets, call the box office at 646-430-5374 or visit www.czechmarionettes.org.

Stand-Up Presidential Campaign

Filibusted, a comic review of the current presidential campaign, is the brainchild of producing artistic director of the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, Craig Smith, who approached stand-up comic, Al Pagano, with the suggestion of an hour-long burlesque on the national free-for-all into which the sacred task of electing the next leader of the free world has devolved. If this campaign is notable for a public that looks to outlier candidates not beholden to big money and who tell it like it is, what better way to cut through the bombast, double talk, pomposity, dogma, pretentiousness and, yes, lies, than with the gentle and not so gentle barbs of humor.

Written and performed with enthusiasm by Al Pagano and Amy Loughead, Filibusted is a reference to the perfectly legal stymying of the legislative process in the Senate with endless babble; and clearly a comment on the vociferous if also loud and meandering voices in a field of presidential hopefuls who compete mercilessly for our attention as we stumble forward in our selection of a president. It is we voters who are “filibusted” in the process, Pagano and Loughead point out. Hence the brilliant and eye-opening decision of Pagano to allow the candidates to speak for themselves, as Pagano tells us at the very outset:

“Now the reason we aren’t just jumping right into the show is that we want you to know that most of the words this evening which are attributed to the candidates are actually the candidates’ own.” Yes, let ‘em hang themselves on ropes of their own fashioning! “We didn’t change, alter or manipulate much of what they said in any way... we just took their words (out of context) and like pieces of a puzzle, inserted them into scenes of our imagining, to serve our own ends.”

Just as a surgeon might cover all of the body save the segment to which she will apply her knife, Pagano and Loughead thus manage to isolate comments by our candidates, the better to hold them up for all to view and dissect. All of this is wrapped, we are told, in “a series of scenes, sketches and games,” and here begins the fun. Between opening and closing salvos (Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton), we will hear candidates opine on topics such as flirting (“All the women on 'The Apprentice' flirted with me, consciously or unconsciously. It’s to be expected," says Donald Trump), prenuptials, safe sex (“I’m not sure we need a half a billion dollars for women’s health issues,” says Jeb Bush), staying in shape and threesomes. We will be treated to an imagined Schwarzenegger riff on amending the constitution to allow him to enter the field of candidates and listen to the privileged power brokers of our time cravenly compete in a “race to the bottom” of their hard luck stories to suggest to voters that they are who they are not: just ordinary Joes scrambling for a living like you and me (“My school had these popcorn balls ad they looked really good. But they were a nickel. I never had a popcorn ball,” says Ben Carson).

The estimable surgeon Carson is given a sketch of his own, the better to highlight such statements as “A lot of people who go into prison straight and when they come out, they’re gay, so did something happen while they were in there?” And he asks, “How about we have a transgender bathroom? It’s not fair for them to make everybody else uncomfortable.” Although clearly a man of enormous experience in his chosen field, he alludes to the fact that he has never held office noting that, “every signer of the Declaration of Independence had no federal elected office experience.” 

Stand-up includes gesture along with the written word to make its point and the exaggerations of mime in capturing the candidates was especially illuminating. Perhaps the most inspired sketch was the one called “Immigration Game” in which the audience is treated to a panorama of comments over centuries on immigration and quizzed, in multiple choice format, as to the author of the quote—present candidate or figures from the past. But better not to give away the store and leave the leavening and illumination of this sketch to the occasion of your attendance at this engaging and witty performance.

Filibusted's last performance is at 10 p.m. on Feb. 13 at The Wild Project (195 East 3rd St. between Avenue A and B) in Manhattan. Tickets are $20 and include one drink. For tickets, call 212-352-3101 or visit http://www.phoenixtheatreensemble.org/filibusted/.

Nightmare on the High Seas

If art is about digging beneath the surfaces of things and restoring wholeness to human experience, run to see In The Soundless Awe, an important new play by Jayme McGhan and Andy Pederson now playing at Access Theater until Dec. 12. One of three plays in repertory with the New Light Theater Project (NLTP), it is beautifully produced and imaginatively directed by Sarah Norris, a founding artistic director of the NLTP company.

At the heart of the play is Captain Charles Butler McVay III, a highly decorated third generation Navy officer and the commander of the U.S.S. Indianapolis when two Japanese torpedoes struck it just after midnight on July 30, 1945. Three hundred men were killed in the first 12 minutes it took the ship to sink. Over the next five days, 900 more languished unsheltered on the high seas fighting sun, sharks, dehydration, starvation and exhaustion while anticipating rescue any minute. Three SOS signals had been sent as the ship went down but 600 more men would die before survivors were accidentally sighted by pilots on a routine patrol and rescued. It was the largest loss of life in U.S. naval history. McVay was court-martialed and found guilty of “failing to zigzag,” a way of steering to avoid enemy fire, although this maneuver was technically at the discretion of the commanding officer (himself).

How does one plumb such an experience: five days, 900 men and the mothers, fathers, wives and children forever caught in its vast net? This might have been a play about a Navy cover-up: its failure to provide standard destroyer escort for the ship (although six days earlier a destroyer was similarly torpedoed on the same route); and its mangled rescue operation that inexcusably left 900 men in the cold Pacific waters for five interminable days. But In The Soundless Awe is less about events—a sinking, court martial and suicide—than about an experience that is simply beyond the ability of the mind to grasp. What do we do with such an experience? What does it look like? What are its consequences for the survivors? For the families of those who did not survive? And for our navy and military, which in deflecting blame to one of its own, set the stage, the writers imply, for cover-ups to come in Vietnam and elsewhere. For us?

This is a deftly written and ambitious script that zigzags back and forth in real-time, in remembered time and in imagined time not so much as a way to tell us a story as to imitate the flow of mind itself in its perpetual return to the frozen moment, to the five days on the high seas which will forever imprison those who lived through it. On stage the bodies of the actors freeze and unfreeze as they play out the bits and pieces of this terrible scene: attempts of the Captain and his crew to distract themselves, delusions of help on a horizon, sharing the little water they had, discovering that a mate has lost a leg to a shark, the dying of the men one by one. A suggestive and repeating motif, the Gray Lady (Hallie Wage), a beautiful and tempting siren of death and release, pulls the dying off stage but also dances with McVay. The Captain imagines a meeting with his stern and distant father and plays cards with friends years after his court martial, but his mind always returns to those five days on the water until he steps out of time itself by raising a gun to his head.

The actors work in a theatrical style in which choreographed movement and gesture, video, lighting and sound matter as much as, or even more, than the words spoken. A stage direction includes a note: “nightmarish and Kafkaesque,” but so much more in the production is not in the script—the eerie blue light that bathes the stage when we first enter the theater; video clips noting each day on the water and how many men are still living. Phantasmagoria and metaphor are the keys to the excavation of the inner world of McVay, but also to a shared human interior. The creative direction of Norris and her brilliant creative and production team deepen the script and give the play its juice and strange beauty. The ensemble, who take on a variety of roles, are outstanding. The two actors who play McVay as a young man and as an old man, Chris Kipiniak and Leo Farley, are convincing.

In The Soundless Awe is a well-executed, well-conceived and beautifully produced play. What makes it important is that it enlarges the violated human dimension of a terrible event in our shared American history. It opens our hearts and imagination to the wartime experience of men who sacrificed for our common welfare. 

In Soundless Awe” runs until Dec. 12 at Access Theater (380 Broadway, 4th Floor, between White and Walker Sts.) in lower Manhattan. Performances run Thursday-Saturday at 8 p.m. Check NewLightTheaterProject.com for the exact schedule. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased by calling 800-838-3006 or visiting BrownPaperTickets.com. Limited blocks of free and discount tickets for veterans or active-duty personnel are available. Inquire at NewLightTheaterProject@gmail.com.