Let the Soleil shine in

Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil's Les Éphémères at the Park Avenue Armory, New York Post, July 10.

And we're off with this year's Lincoln Center Festival! Tonight I'm catching a Hungarian production of Chekhov's Ivanov at John Jay.

Off we go to the Lincoln Center Festival

Rather than a full preview, today in the Post I offer my highly subjective picks for this year's Lincoln Center Festival, which starts tomorrow.

The kick-off alone should be something to behold: Part 1 of Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil's Les Ephémères, to unfurl at the Park Avenue Armory. It's Mnouchkine's first show here since 2005's Le Dernier Caravansérail, and if you happened to see that…well, chances are you already have tickets for the new one.

Thrilling actors rock Yasmina Reza

Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage at the Bernard P. Jacobs Theatre, New York Post, March 23.

If you want to see well-heeled fur fly, go see this play. Come to think of it, can well-heeled fur fly? No matter: The show is a nasty delight.

The French boards, part 2

And now, the present…

Le Monde just ran an interesting interview with director Luc Bondy. One of the things he talks about is the difference between public and private institutions in France. Here in New York, the scene is very roughly divided in three: Broadway, Off Broadway and Off-Off Broadway houses. In Paris, you have institutions that get public subsidies and those that rely more on box-office revenues; the former is meant to present fare that's more demanding (with lower ticket prices), while the latter is meant to be more commercial (and is more expensive).

The difference can get muddy, though, as a public institution like Chaillot has often presented accessible, popular shows by directors Jérôme Deschamps and Macha Makeïeff, for instance, while private theaters can show fare that's much edgier than we get on the Off scene here.

The Swiss-born Bondy, who's worked a lot in German-speaking countries (he ran the Schaubühne in Berlin, and has been artistic director of the Vienna Festival for 20 years), says of French subsidized theater: "There's people with great potential, but the output is mediocre. First, because the French are very germanophile, they think everything that comes from Germany is great and they get very derivative. They need their own pride. It's true that it's more difficult to do theater in France than in Germany because the French are more extroverted than the German. In introverted countries, theater is the place where you're free. In extroverted countries such as France or Italy, it requires more effort to find a language." [I think he means a theatrical language here, obviously.]

Bondy on actors: "In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, actors work are hired in companies. They may be less afraid to act than French actors, because they have that safety net. But that sense of safety also sometimes makes them sure of themselves and less curious than French actors, who can get deeply involved in a project. The greatest issue in France is the ostracism between public and private theater. There are great actors working in the private sector that you'd dream of seeing in the public one. And vice versa. But the two areas are like two dogs barking at each other. It's true that when you see the price of tickets in private theaters, and those who can afford them, you don't necessarily want to work there. But without sounding populist, I find unbearable the idea that people can't go to a good boulevard play because it's too expensive. You can learn a lot from boulevard. There's a technique and actors that are marvelous. In England, they can take a tragedy by Eschylus and turn it into a play. They don't have that separation between pure and impure, which is false: a play is good or it isn't. One of the greatest conductors in the world for me was Bernstein, who led Beethoven's symphonies like no one else and wrote West Side Story. That culture is missing today."

Bondy is perceived as high-brow in France, but he's also doing quite well at the box office. Last time I was in Paris, for instance, I couldn't see his staging of Marivaux's La Seconde Surprise de l'Amour at the supposedly elite Bouffes du Nord (Peter Brook's former home, and the inspiration for BAM's Harvey Theater): it was such a big fat hit that there were no tickets to be found. When Marivaux sells out without the help of marquee-name stars, you know the director is doing something right.

The French boards, part 1

Part one of a post about French theater, ie something we rarely see in New York.

First, the past…

Reading about the recent publication of the correspondence of Gérard Philipe and his friend, actor/writer Georges Perros, I learned that even when he was a huge star in the 1940s and 1950s (think James Dean if he had been French, known equally for this theater work as for his films, and a Marx reader), Philipe's name would be listed in the middle of the casts in Jean Vilar's Théâtre National Populaire, which were organized alphabetically. The entire troupe, including him, also made the same salary. Granted, he also had an income from his screen hits, but still, I like that he was paid the same as his less famous colleagues.

I was also stunned to learn that since the troupe put on classics in repertory, Philipe could play up to four different parts in a single week—and we're talking big leads here, like the title characters in Corneille's Le Cid or Kleist's The Prince of Homburg.

Hitting the sawdust

Caught an evening of "new circus" Friday night at the French Alliance. The terms refers to a hybrid of circus, dance, theater and performance art (completely devoid of animals) that's quite popular in France but not really practiced here, where circus means either Ringling Brothers or Cirque du Soleil. The most famous practitioner may be James Thiérrée, who gets gigs at BAM, but otherwise we don't see much new circus in New York, save for the occasional short run at the New Victory Theater on 42nd St.

The French Alliance program introduced four companies, each performing a 20-minute excerpt from its regular evening-length show. The overall tone was elliptical and arty, with varying degrees of success. My favorite was Compagnie XY, whose series of balancing acts used suitcases of various sizes as props; the program explained that "the production examines the outward physical mobility of travel and the interior stagnate life of each traveler," but I mostly saw, well, a balancing act, albeit one with very nice dry humor. A shoe-in for the New Vic.

My other fave was Compagnie Bal's "Éloge du poil" (pictured), in which Jeanne Mordoj, sporting a fake beard, starts off with a contortionist bit, performs ventriloquism with two animal skulls and slides an egg yolk around her neck and along her arms. It's fairly opaque and vaguely creepy, and quite memorable. This one could do well at PS 122.

Jean-Baptiste André used a video camera to add another visual element to his balancing routine. It would have impressed me more if Compagnie 111 hadn't done something very similar in its amazing Plan B at the New Vic a few years ago. Still, André's bit elicited delighted oooh's and aaah's from the audience.

As for Compagnie Chant de Balles, there's only so much juggling I can take, even backed by a live lute player. Especially backed by a live lute player.

Horseman of the apocalypse

I just love tales of artists gone wild and wow, did Bartabas go wild! Or just plain nuts.

New Yorkers may know the monomonickered Bartabas as the leader of the equestrian troupe Zingaro, whose shows Chimere and Eclipse were seen here (under a bigtop) a few years ago. In addition to Zingaro, he runs an equestrian academy in Versailles. Bartabas is all about the poetry of the horse, the unique relationship between man and animal, etc. It's like a highbrow version of Steve Irwin set to world music, an approach that doesn't particularly touch me but whatev'—he's popular.

Back in December, our whisperer du cheval was supposed to meet with a representative from the regional cultural-affairs office to discuss public subsidies to the academy. When told that 4% of the 2008 state contribution was going to be put on hold, Bartabas flipped out, threw a chair at his interlocutor and smashed his desk, stormed out of the office and wrecked xerox machines and a radiator on his way out. He spent the night at the police station.

As if this wasn't embarrassing enough, the latest news is that Bartabas has just sent a letter to the French minister of culture asking her to apologize for preventing him to perform the night of the incident. It's this kind arrogant sense of entitlement that gives cultural subsidies (which I unequivocally support) a bad name. On the other hand, it's small potatoes compared to the current cultural, er, forays made by President Sarkozy.

Mind expansion

The 61st edition of the Avignon Festival has just ended—not that you'd know the three-week event had happened at all by reading the US press. That's okay I guess: Avignon is only one of the largest theater festivals in the world. That's probably why for the past several days the Times' chief critic, Ben Brantley, has been blogging about his theater marathon in London; typically, it started off with a show starring Orlando Bloom. Meanwhile, Avignon has presented productions staged by the likes of Frank Castorf, Ariane Mnouchkine, Rodrigo Garcia, Sasha Waltz and Romeo Castellucci. And that's only the ones who might ring a bell among NYC theater freaks. I mean, just look at the photo on the left: Doesn't it make you want to see more? At least you will be able to for this particular one: It's from Castellucci's show, Hey Girl!, which is coming to Montclair in February.

What's frustrates me is this lack of inquisitiveness about what's happening in the field you're meant to be covering. If you're going to spend some time across the Atlantic, wouldn't it make sense to also cross the Channel and poke around? Wouldn't you be the least bit curious? Wouldn't you want to experience theater that's completely different from what we see here, instead of just a more competent version of our regular fare? (For make no mistake, that's what London offers.) Reading the Times, you would never know that in the past 10, 15 years, an entire generation of directors has rethought European theater, and that a new generation is now coming up to scramble up the parameters all over again.

Compare this attitude with The New Yorker's Alex Ross, who regularly covers a wide geographical area. Typically, he just wrote a piece about a new opera titled Alice in Wonderland that just premiered in Munich (check out the mouth-watering video here). What's great about the article is how Ross translates the appeal of the production for the likes of me, someone with an interest in the field but who isn't a hardcore buff. He also makes it very clear why covering this type of show is important not only for American readers, but for the health of the American opera scene itself.

Uptown harvest

I've quite enjoyed the three shows I've seen so far at the Lincoln Center Festival. At this rate 2007 may be my favorite edition, and I've been in town for almost all of them.

The award for best surprise goes to Fables de La Fontaine. I had pretty much dismissed Robert Wilson (see my account of Quartett for the latest entry in an alarmingly long list of frustrating experiences) and went mainly to hear the classic text enunciated by actors from the Comédie-Française. The thing with Wilson is that at this point, he has a one-style-fits-all approach; when it doesn't fit the material, you're in for hours of stylish ennui, but when it does, the results are spectacular and completely unique—for better or for worse, you immediately know when you're watching a Wilson show. Miraculously, his style meshed perfectly with the wicked cruelty of La Fontaine's fables, in which animals act out short morality tales. (I won't soon forget Wolf's red, red tongue flicking out in gleeful anticipation at the sight of hapless Lamb.) For once, Wilson's hieratic, emotionless staging brought out subtext instead of flattening everything in sight. As an added bonus, I was lucky to attend one of the performances in which the Comédie-Française's big boss, Muriel Mayette, appeared (she was replacing the injured Madeleine Marion).

I was also impressed by Gemelos (pictured), brought to us by the Chilean Compañia Teatro Cinema. The play is based on Agota Kristof's The Notebook, the first in a trilogy (which I actually read about ten years ago) set in an unnamed post-WWII communist country, likely to be Kristof's own Hungary. While I was surprised at first by the production's warm visual tones (I tend to associate the Iron Curtain with a gray palette), the staging's inventiveness quickly became evident. The three actors evolved in what looked like a puppet theater and used stylized movement and perspective tricks to draw us into Kristof's increasingly sinister story. Shades of Shockheaded Peter and various other productions from the Improbable Company in the treatment, and I loved the way the show's darkness so gradually set in.

The most radical show so far was Un Hombre que se Ahoga, an adaptation of Chekhov's Three Sisters by a Buenos Aires company. Director Daniel Veronese (whose Women Dreamt Horses I kick myself for missing at PS 122 a few months ago) basically gave the play the kind of treatment people in cardiac arrest get on ER: two paddles to the chest and ZAP! His note in the program explains "It is a play without cuts in time or space; without music or light cues; with a summarized text; with modified scenes, their location shifted; and with characters wandering around, sometimes in improper situations."

Oh god…

But wait, that's not all! Veronese also effected a "change in gender of each one of Chekhov's characters. There are now three brothers confined in a house surrounded by military women."

It took me a little while to get used to the reversal—the men were not playing women in drag but men, ie Masha, Olga and Irina were dudes' names, while Andrei was a female character. Once you accepted the premise—and why not?—and the fact that this would be a radical jumble of Three Sisters, the production proved surprisingly enjoyable; it helped that the actors (wearing their regular street clothes) were superb throughout, with special kudos for Pablo Messiez' impetuously slackerish Natasha and Claudio Da Passano's hangdog, world-weary Olga.

Perhaps the prospect of extreme deconstruction—read: boring—scared off local theatergoers, since there were plenty of empty seats at the performance I attended. Too bad: Far from being a sterile, barren academic jerk-off, the show was gloriously physical and surprisingly accessible, and at 90 minutes, a quick and efficient punch. It made me ponder once again the sad state of experimentation when it comes to NYC companies.

Cherry on the cake: At the post-performance Q&A, the audience (mostly Spanish-speaking) fired off at the actors some of the most thoughtful, articulate questions I've ever heard at any of these events. You reap what you sow…

Crawling back into dilettantism

Yikes, vacation sure can take its toll on a blog, though it's also great to leave the web alone for a while. A few thoughts to wrap up the French trip, which was lighter on the gulcher than usual (though I'd certainly include watching Over the Hedge, which includes a brilliant voice-over performance by Steve Carell, on video).

I suppose the main event was seeing Heiner Müller's Quartett, which I've alluded to before. The text is based on Laclos' Liaisons dangereuses, which Müller has boiled down to its two key characters, Valmont and Merteuil, and to a dozen incredibly dense pages. I'd love to see it again in a production emphatically not by Robert Wilson, whose formula just feels tired and mercenary at this point—mercenary because based on the past five-six shows by him I've seen, he now applies the same predictable boilerplate tricks to whatever he's meant to stage at one of the many international houses of culture that inexplicably keep on hiring him. In the case of this Quartett, Wilson incorporated elements from two of his own previous stagings. From the 1988 New York production, for instance, we seemed to inherit the three extra characters—including an old man—and a prologue of a sort in which the actors seat at a banquet table.

While Wilson had Lucinda Childs as Merteuil back then, we had Isabelle Huppert, who was the show's main draw. The command she had over the technical aspects of her performance was astonishing, something that was obvious from her first line, which she repeated over and over with barely perceptible variations in speed and pitch, incongruously—and somehow convincingly—sounding like a spoken version of a Philip Glass piece. It's hard to talk about anything that's not purely technical when referring to actors in a Wilson piece anyway, because to him they are nothing more than elements in his visual compositions, no more or less important than the lighting, costumes or set. No wonder he makes them move slowly and adopt dramatically geometric gestures: The only obviously human component he allows them is speech (and in this case not even to all of them—of the five people onstage in this Quartett, three remain silent). In his notes on the show, Wilson explains that "en 35 ou 38 ans de travail, je n'ai pas une seule fois dit à un comédien ce qu'il devait penser en termes de texte, de sentiment, d'émotion." ("In a 35- or 38-year career, I've never once told an actor what he should think in terms of text, feeling, emotion.")

I don't actually have a problem with that approach, except that to make an impact, you need to deliver superb visuals and topnotch sound design. Alas, Wilson's well seems to have gone dry: At times Quartett felt dated, at others slightly ridiculous (and let's charitably ignore the attempts at humor). I'd be curious to see how long Wilson can continue to coast on two blue spotlights and three red frocks.

Isabelle vs. Isabelle

A few days after blogging about the two Isabelles (Huppert, left, and Adjani) being on the Parisian stage at the same time—but certainly not the same place—I coincidentally came across a funny article exploring the very same thing. In a Nouvel Observateur piece titled "La guerre des Isabelle" ("the Isabelles War"), Marie-Elisabeth Rouchy details the actresses' rivalry, which goes back to that Brontë sisters movie they made with André Téchiné back in 1979, when their respective agents would time their screen time to make sure one didn't get more than the other. Adjani recalls that Téchiné didn't want them to wear makeup but that they always tried to sneak some on while he wasn't looking so one wouldn't look plainer than the other. (The third sister was played by the wonderful Marie-France Pisier, but you don't see her get into feuds with anybody.)

More good stuff from the article for non-francophones:

In the late ’70s, Huppert and Adjani both wanted to star in a film adaptation of Théophile Gaultier's La dame aux camélias (usually known here as Camille). Huppert won that one, but Adjani scored a few years later when she got to do a project they both coveted, the life of Camille Claudel.

Even more deliciously (and that I had totally forgotten about), Huppert starred in Schiller's Maria Stuart in London in 1996—the character Adjani is now playing in Paris, but in Wolfgang Hildsheimer's lesser-known version of Stuart's last moments.

Rouchy also tallies the actresses' Césars (Adjani's four to Huppert's one), respective filmographies (Adjani's 27 movies to Huppert's 76) and media profiles (Adjani's breakup with Jean-Michel Jarre lands her in French celebrity magazines, Huppert gets a retrospective at MoMA and a hardcover book of portraits).

Since of course it's more exciting pick a camp, I unhesitantly join the Huppertists—though it's quite fun to watch Adjani vainly try to fight Time and in the process resemble more and more a porcelain doll.

And that's the end of tonight's Star Watch.