I normally don’t like to use From the Ledge as an outlet to rant and rave about life’s daily annoyances, but I was just incensed by this ridiculous, childish, temper tantrum of a controversy involving About Face’s splendid production of The Little Dog Laughed (which I wrote about here) and its diva playwright, Douglas Carter Beane. It seems that Beane was upset that director Eric Rosen took out the full-frontal nudity specified in the script in the scene when the agent Diane discovers her client Mitchell being intimate with the male hustler, Alex, and instead had the actors play the scene in their underwear. Beane demanded the production to be shut down (shut down!- is this Chicago or is this Pyongyang? What kind of state of mind does one possess to even contemplate a demand like this?), but what I could only imagine as really intense ass-kissing and floor-wiping by various parties, Norma Desmond’s fraternal twin Beane relented and agreed to let the production finish its run…but not without extracting a pound of flesh from Rosen, who had to publicize this imbroglio by writing a letter containing an apology to all media outlets about the mortal sin and crime against divaness that he has committed. You can read about it in detail here, and read comments about it in Chris Jones’s blog here.
After an underwhelming second production in the series, the surprisingly old-fashioned mounting of Shaw’s Saint Joan by the Shaw Festival of Canada, the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre closes its important World Stage Series with the fantastic, esoteric theatre geek’s nirvana, Fragments. Directed by legendary theatrical innovator Peter Brook, and starring three members of the acclaimed, movement-based, experimental theatre company Complicite, including one of its co-founders, the brilliant Marcello Magni, Fragments is an hour-long collection of five of Samuel Beckett’s rarely-produced short plays. Brook, Beckett, Complicite- wow, the euphoric rush this combination brings to the serious theatrelover is probably similar to the rush many sports fans felt last night during Superbowl XLII when the NY Giants pulled that stunning upset. Well, ok, maybe not. The short plays that comprise Fragments are sketches, short glimpses into the ironic, dark, lonely nature of lives that Beckett’s works illuminate- they’re definitely not the supremely evolved insights into the human condition of his full-length plays like Waiting for Godot or Happy Days- but they are still intellectually intriguing and beautifully theatrical. Although all five are brilliantly written and staged, with flawless physical performances, I especially liked the first two immensely. In “Rough for Theatre I”, Magni as a blind musician and Jos Houben, as a crippled old man, wonderfully explore the changing dynamics of any relationship, from forging a connection, to warm friendship, to co-dependence and helplessness, to fierce adversarial conflicts, driven by the many complicated facets of human nature that make us loving and generous one moment, and stubborn and self-involved the next. In “Rockabye”, the glorious Kathryn Hunter, using a stunningly expressive and emotional voice, and carefully calibrated rocking in a rocking chair, paints a searing picture of the desolation and desperation of abandoned old-age. Brook’s minimalist direction and the well-composed dramatic lighting allows Beckett’s text, and the dark places of life that it seeks to present, to be shown-off to its maximum impact. This is sophisticated theatre that we in Chicago are very lucky to have access to (although the production has been acclaimed in the UK and Paris, we are the only North American stop in its international tour, which also includes stops in Spain, Italy, Austria, and Hong Kong). I would normally be hectoring people to go and run to the Chicago Shakespeare and grab what few tickets are still left (I guess many of the performances are sold out) but I also realize that not a lot of people “get” Beckett. For those of you who do, this is an unmissable, one-of-a-kind event.
So I celebrated the first night I wasn’t running an Asia/UK conference call in three weeks by taking advantage of the newly-discovered pleasures of Comcast on Demand and ordering up a movie I missed when it first came out last fall, David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, which garnered a very well-deserved Academy Award Best Actor nomination for Viggo Mortensen. I preferred the last Cronenberg-Mortensen collaboration, A History of Violence, because I think the writing in that movie was much more complex and asked intriguing questions about the decisions people make to stunt if not eliminate altogether an inherent propensity to violence. Eastern Promises, although it contains some of the themes around violence and its drivers, as well as the complex good-guy/bad-guy duality many people possess, similar to the previous movie, is a much more straightforward film about the Russian mob in London. Despite interesting glimpses into the practices and motivations of that community, the screenplay is not as richly detailed as I hoped it would be. The acting though is superlative: Naomi Watts, the great Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, Sinead Cusack (who I just saw and loved on Broadway in Stoppard’s Rock n’Roll), and Armin Mueller-Stahl give very detailed, memorable, multi-dimensional performances. But I think the one person who matches Viggo’s intensity, daring, and you-can’t-take-your-eyes-off-him factor is the French actor Vincent Cassel, playing the closeted, drunken, emotionally volatile mobster, who starts off as Viggo’s boss and ends up his peer. Cassel is always interesting to watch, and here he is riveting. His near-breakdown at the end of the movie with the baby is great film acting, and I love the fact that he really pulls out all the stops in creating the homoerotic flavor of his character’s relationship with Viggo’s character, Nikolai (when he nuzzles Viggo with his head, he brings homoeroticism to a very different place! Like, get a motel room already!). Viggo is stunning in a very subtle, very measured, but very multi-faceted performance. He doesn’t have any huge dramatic scenes, but every time he is onscreen, you are just drawn to him. He paints a very believable picture of a man in control, who leads many lives that no one person can totally see, full of interesting backstories and conflicting motivations. And that much talked-about naked steam room fight scene- whoa, down boy! It is a technically accomplished scene and Viggo is probably the only actor in recent memory with the guts, and well, literally, the balls, to play that scene without any inhibitions and coy camera angles. Viggo might not win Best Actor on February 24, but if it was up to me, and those BOATLOADs of gay men, straight women, and straight-identifying men straddling that pesky continuum, he should get an award for making late-night fantasy lives come true! OK, Cronenberg, and the film critics and theorists can say all they want about that scene being a metaphor for this and that in the face of violence and death, yada, yada, yada, but people, it’s Aragon himself without a stitch on. Forget metaphors!
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