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Shows Worth Seeing:
Primo
Based on Primo Levi's If This is a Man
Music Box Theatre
239 W. 45th St.
Box office: (212) 239-6200
Anyone with a scrap of sensitivity is bound to be
apprehensive about a theatrical adaptation of Primo Levi’s
masterpiece If This is a Man (1947), the memoir published
in the U.S. as Survival in Auschwitz. As many have observed,
there’s something slightly obscene about artistic representation
of the Holocaust, no matter how sensitively done, because representation
is necessarily comparative and comparison necessarily cheapens
such incommensurable suffering. If you’re absolutely bent
on representation, however, the least obscene choice is to work
from direct testimony, as Peter Weiss did in The Investigation,
and as the British actor Anthony Sher does in this solo show Primo.
Dressed in a plain, professorial vest, tie and slacks, Sher speaks
an abridged, 90-minute version of If This is a Man (cuts
were the only adaptation the Levi estate would allow) on a grim,
barren set of plain concrete walls with a single wooden chair.
He animates Levi’s precise scientist’s prose with
a coolly understated yet vulnerable air of puzzlement and bemusement,
evidently understanding that more demonstrative expressions of
emotion would have disgusted rather than moved. Awful as it may
sound, the result is tasteful. The show comes off as a sort of
diabolical bedtime story that no one really wants to hear but
everyone acknowledges as necessary and strangely eloquent in its
clinical exactitude. The most important thing, after all, is to
hand this story down, and tasteful solo recitation is as good
a means as any in an age of dwindling reading. I do wish that
the audience were younger than it perforce is at Broadway ticket
prices. The most protective move the Levi estate could've made
for his legacy would’ve been to insist (as, say, John Leguizamo
has done with his Broadway solo shows) that cheap tickets be made
available for every performance.
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Her Long Black Hair
By Janet Cardiff
Starting point at 6th Ave. and Central Park South
Runs Thurs.-Sun., 10 a.m. - 3:30 p.m., Free
In case you found the $90 tickets to Deborah Warner’s
Angel Project a bit steep last summer, another, equally
haunting theater experience involving a guided outdoor walking
tour has returned to New York until Sept. 11, and it’s COMPLETELY
FREE. Canadian artist Janet Cardiff’s Her Long Black
Hair is an audio walk through Central Park inspired by a
set of old snapshots she found at a flea market. Speaking seductively
to the spectator through headphones, Cardiff blends personal reminiscence
with penetrating observation and free association, constructing
a possible history for the photos while leading the spectator
on a beautiful, physically involving adventure. The artist’s
quiet apercus about the Park environment, and life in general,
are much more likely to prompt new insights into those matters
than a million orange gates are. One caution: this piece is not
to be attended with chatty friends. It’s best savored as
a mesmerizing solitary experience to be surrendered to and mulled
over later.
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Orson's Shadow
By Austin Pendleton
Barrow Street Theatre
27 Barrow St.
Box office: (212) 239-6200
Given the occupational hazards of its backstage-drama genre—mawkish
thespian nostalgia, smug insider humor, dead celebrity fawning—it’s
all the more gratifying to see how sharp, engaging and ambitious
Orson’s Shadow is. Set in 1960, the play centers
on the London premiere of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros,
which Austin Pendleton imagines as a fortuitous occasion in which
Lawrence Olivier, Orson Welles and Kenneth Tynan are thrust together
in exceedingly unlikely collaboration. The fictional conceit is
that each of these monomaniacs was looking at the time for a path
out of a personal impasse and, for different reasons, saw opportunity
in this absurdist drama that none of them particularly liked.
Pendleton cleverly interweaves their public career dilemmas with
their private angsts (notably the messy end of Olivier’s
marriage to Vivien Leigh while he’d already taken up with
Joan Plowright), and the result is a poignant rumination on self-obstruction
among the brilliantly gifted. Among the greatest pleasures in
the evening is the acting: Jeff Still’s pompously self-pitying
portrayal of Welles, Tracy Letts’s eloquently stuttering
Tynan, and John Judd’s dead-on portrait of Olivier’s
self-conscious vanity. Susan Bennett as plump, steely Plowright
and Lee Roy Rogers as the aging, manic-depressive Leigh add just
the right bookends of control and desperation. Hats off to director
David Cromer for keeping so many difficult balls in the air the
whole time.
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Spamalot
By Eric Idle and John Du Prez
Shubert Theatre
225 W. 44th St.
Box office: (212)239-6200
The great surprise of this musical recycling of
the classic movie comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail
is the amount of pleasure that can evidently be had at a Broadway
show almost completely devoid of surprises. The play is not so
much written as cobbled together from gags and vignettes so familiar
to the audience that laughs often occur before a joke is told.
The very appearance of certain beloved faux-medieval costumes,
props and set pieces is enough to create giggling spasms at some
points. There are scraps of novelty: the addition of silly songs
and Vegas razzle-dazzle, as well as the transformation of self-consciousness
about film into self-consciousness about theater (the toothsome
Sara Ramirez, as the Lady of the Lake, has some wonderfully gratuitous
numbers). The show is basically a masterful spectacle of repackaging,
though. And what’s interesting about that is that the audience
is laughing at the old gags for new reasons. People seem to savor
the experience of enjoying the jokes in the particular circumstance
of the theater, perhaps because that communal context recalls
the original post-screening group-guffaws that extended their
first enjoyment of the movie for months and years afterward. Quasi-private
ribbing is reinvented and validated as a public event. In any
case, the palpable thrill of rediscovery has a college-reunion
flavor that is undeniably infectious.
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Doubt
By John Patrick Shanley
Walter Kerr Theatre
219 W. 48th St.
Box office: (212) 239-6200
This splendidly acted, 90-minute clenched fist of a play may
be the most penetrating and tautly written work of Shanley’s
long career. It’s certainly the most urgent. Cherry Jones
plays a tight-lipped, straight-laced, rule-mongering nun who,
as principal of a Bronx Catholic school in 1964, suspects the
young parish priest of misbehaving with an 8th-grade boy. She
has no hard evidence but nevertheless feels certain and is determined
to bring the priest down. Father Flynn is clever, earnest, liberal
and likeable, though, and the actor Brian F. O’Byrne gives
him a fascinatingly ambiguous edge of intellectual ambitiousness.
By the time he finishes defending himself the audience doesn’t
know whom to believe. Jones’s severity as Sister Aloysius
is frightening and her authoritarian harangues about self-effacement
in teaching to Sister James (Heather Goldenhersh), the boy’s
teacher, make her hateful, but as she presses the question of
the kid’s immediate safety--in the context of a rigid, top-down
institutional structure that won't protect him--the plot starts
to work as a powerful parable of justice and pseudo-justice in
a time of supposed emergency. Director Doug Hughes has found just
the right pace for the action, keeping it tightly coiled until
about two-thirds through when open confrontation replaces speculation
and insinuation. It’s thrilling to watch these formidable
actors run with the ball after that point, particularly when you
can really see their faces. Anyone who can afford it should spring
for the front seats in the big Broadway theater where the show
has now moved; the nature of the stalemate between this nun and
priest can't be fully appreciated without seeing the subtlety
of O'Byrne's reactions during the penultimate scene.
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