MACBETH: The Seeing Place Offers A Gritty Production in Tune With the Mood of the Country

 Brandon Walker and Erin Cronican
Photo by Russ Rowland

The Seeing Place's rapid-paced production of Shakespeare's Macbeth at the Paradise Factory in the East Village is a flaming roller coaster plunge that engulfs the power-grubbing pair at its center, along with anyone else who has the misfortunate of being in the path of their callous ascent or their inexorable free-fall to doom. 

There is a distinctly nihilistic tone to this gritty production, one that by sheer happenstance permeates another Shakespeare work right across the street at the New York Theatre Workshop, the star-powered Othello that likewise concerns itself with the "collateral damage" wrought by a calculating sociopath. A sign of our times?  

More than is true with most presentations, the characters of Macbeth (Brandon Walker) and his lady (Erin Cronican) come off as minor and ill-prepared members of the aristocracy who are suddenly presented with the opportunity to rise to the highest ranks. All (!) they have to do is murder the sitting King Duncan (G. W. Reed), who conveniently is spending the night with them under light guard.    

As portrayed by Mr. Walker, Macbeth may be a worthy soldier, honored in the opening scene for his valor on the battlefield, but he makes for a lousy civilian leader. He is an out-of-control child whose toy gun has been replaced by a loaded one, and his milk-and-cookies with a flask of artificial courage. Egged on by his glory-seeking wife and by the prophesies of the three witches (Jane Kahler, Lisa-Marie Newton, and Candice Oden), Macbeth does the deed and sets into motion the crumbling of the kingdom and the destruction of any who stand in his way, including women and children and imagined enemies. 

There is no point in blaming things on fate. To pull in a line from another of Shakespeare's plays, "the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves." Here, for instance, the witches come off not so much as key players bent on bringing Macbeth to his knees for their own cackling pleasure, but as passers-by whom Macbeth happens to run into. He is the "something wicked" who enters their world, and not the other way around. All that unfolds lies within Macbeth's capacity to control.     

While keeping up the relentless pacing of the production, the company has avoided any trimming of the play, bringing it in at just under two hours without intermission. Even at that pace, one thing that is nicely highlighted is the sad story of the murders of Lady Macduff and her children, and the later reaction of her husband to the news. These are touching moments that underscore the truly horrific damage that Macbeth has wrought, so that we are complicit in wanting to see his downfall.  

As an actor, Brandon Walker is perfectly suited to this role. Walker is never one to stand still, which fits the anxious, pacing, and often out-of-control Macbeth. By way of contrast, Erin Cronican gives us a quieter, more naturalistic Lady Macbeth, the woman-behind-the-man who whispers him into action. While they manage to hold it together, they come off as the perfect power couple. 

The rest of the cast, a mix of Equity and non-Equity actors, does not always mesh in tone, and sometimes the speed of the line readings results in a lack of clarity, but overall this is a strikingly contemporary take on "the Scottish play" that  captures the mood of the country right now and proves once again that Shakespeare's voice is one to be reckoned with for all times.

Feel free to share this blog with your friends, and to offer up your own theater stories by posting a comment. I also invite you to check out the website Show-Score.Com, where you will find capsule reviews of current plays from Yours Truly and many other New York critics.  







  

RHINOCEROS: Antic Production of Classic Absurdist Play by The Seeing Place Theater

Brandon Walker and Logan Keeler
Photo by Justin Hoch

It takes a brave theater company to tackle Eugène Ionesco, that great and unruly master of the absurd whose plays soar with brilliant flights of imagination but also have a propensity for plunging into long expanses of rambling philosophy. That’s Ionesco: the theatrical manifestation of Icarus.

This was true of the 2009 Broadway production of Exit the King that featured a mesmerizing performance by Geoffrey Rush, a confusing one by Susan Sarandon, and, yes, transcendent feats of poetic aerialism coupled with lengthy sections of stultifying earthbound prose. It also was true of the 2014 Theatre for a New Audience production of The Killer that offered a gripping performance by Michael Shannon, a marvelously quirky one by Kristine Nielsen, and – here it comes again – an interminable monolog that brought the entire enterprise to a crashing halt during its final thirty minutes. 

Dauntless and surely aware of the built-in pitfalls, the independent theater company known as The Seeing Place has taken on Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, in performance through the end of this week at the Lynn Redgrave Theater, in rep with Marsha Norman’s Getting Out (reviewed here).

If you are unfamiliar with Rhinoceros, its title says it all; this is a play in which, over the course of the evening, all but one of the inhabitants of a town in France turn into rhinoceroses. First produced in 1959, the play can be viewed as a satire about the rise of fascism, a dig at bureaucratic dehumanization, or a screed against mindless conformity. More in keeping with today’s global political climate, arguments the townspeople have over the apparent invasion by African and Asian rhinos may remind you of the scarily xenophobic anti-immigrant uproar abroad and at home. 

While this production cannot avoid all of the digressive traps (which mostly occur in the second half), the good news is that it’s directed with a great antic hand by the company’s founding artistic director Brandon Walker, who nimbly keeps things bouncily aloft through most of the evening and even manages to get us past the talky bits to regroup for a reanimated airborne ending.     

Walker also stars as Ionesco’s ubiquitous Everyman character, Bérenger.  Here he manifests as a nebbishy, heavy-drinking, day-late-and-a-dollar-short sort of guy who would kinda like to conform to social norms but never seems to get around to following the “how to” advice of his would-be mentor and friend Jean (Logan Keeler). The play’s most famous scene involves the two of them. Bérenger visits Jean’s apartment in order to apologize for a falling out they’d had. During the scene (one that helped clinch a Tony Award for Zero Mostel in the original Broadway production), Jean gradually transforms into a rhinoceros. Mr. Keeler does an excellent job of portraying the metamorphosis through body language, a hoarsening of his voice, and some smears of makeup.  

The entire first half of the play is filled with great comic moments, such as when the character of Mrs. Boeuf (Lisa-Marie Newton) discovers that her husband has turned into a rhino. Instead of accepting the suggestion that she assuredly has legitimate grounds for divorce, she goes running after him, determined to stand by her beast no matter what. 

There is also some wackily overlapping dialog involving two separate conversations at a café. Jean and Bérenger are at one table discussing Jean's plan for straightening out his friend's life, while at the adjacent table, a conversation is taking place about the paradoxes involved in logical syllogisms. The two discussions cleverly collide when the same words and phrases are used in both. 

Periodically, all action is interrupted by the thundering sounds of rampaging rhinos, leading not to general panic, but to arguments over whether the animals have one or two horns. Everything is conducted at a brisk pace, with solid comic timing displayed by the entire cast. 

The second half (the play is written in three acts, but here it is split into two) opens cleverly with a motif borrowed from Night of the Living Dead and other zombie tales. Bérenger is holed up in his apartment trying to avoid contact with the rhinos that surround him. In the production, the cast members who have already transformed mill around and through the audience and help distract from an extended philosophic dialog by holding up signs representing the rhinos’ thoughts. “I was told there would be cake,” reads one, while another declares “this beats working for a living.” 

The play itself ends on a high note with Bérenger’s great declaration of self-determination: “I will not capitulate!” And if you decline to capitulate to Ionesco’s sometimes tangential meanderings, you’ll have a fine time immersing yourself in the fascinatingly absurd ridiculousness of it all.    

Feel free to share this blog with your friends, and to offer up your own theater stories by posting a comment. I also invite you to check out the new website Show-Score.Com, where you will find capsule reviews of current plays from Yours Truly and many other New York critics.  

'Hamlet' and 'Rosenkrantz & Guildenstern' in Rep: Gutsy Productions by The Seeing Place

Voyeurism, simplified.

That is the motto of The Seeing Place, one of those amazing up-and-coming shoestring-budget theater companies that manage to pull off compelling and gutsy productions of challenging plays in various pockets of the city.

I first encountered The Seeing Place, now completing its fourth year of inventive work, when it mounted a thoroughly engaging and insightful production of John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger—much more engaging and insightful, I might add, than the more recent Roundabout rage fest starring Matthew Rhys. 

Now the gang at The Seeing Place have taken on the daunting task of performing, in rotating rep, a pair of theatrical masterworks:  Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Tom Stoppard’s absurdist take on Hamlet, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.   

Same actors taking on the same roles in both plays, with at least some performances of both plays being presented on the same day.  Not unprecedented (Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests comes to mind), but still—what a tour-de-stamina for the actors. 

I thought of this while sitting in the stifling heat of the Sargent Theater on the fourth floor of the American Theatre of Actors on West 54^th Street this past weekend, while watching an undoubtedly sweltering troupe of dedicated performers act their hearts out.  (By now, a promised new air conditioning unit will have been installed, and last week’s heat wave dissipated, so both performers and audiences should be having a better time of it.) 

Of the two plays, it is Hamlet that fares better.  And given The Seeing Place’s emphasis on collaborative actor-driven productions, it makes sense that this would be the case.  Hamlet is an actor’s play, with each iconic role open to and able to support a wide range of interpretations.  

The production is dominated, as it should be, by the title character, here played with Ethan Hawke-like gusto by The Seeing Place’s founding artistic director Brandon Walker.  Mr. Walker brings out all of Hamlet’s neurotic indecision and pretty much erases the distinction between the character’s feigned madness and actual madness.  He is a charismatic and compelling actor, who brings to fruition the company’s motto (voyeurism, simplified) and draws the audience into his world. 

Of the rest of the cast, standouts include the company’s managing director Erin Cronican as an overprotected and vulnerable Ophelia; Jason Wilson and Janice Hall as the self-deluding and, apparently, quite-fond-of-drink King Claudius and Queen Gertrude; and David Arthur Bachrach, who nicely shows off his classical acting chops in the roles of the Ghost, the Player King, and Gravedigger I. 

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is a far more difficult play to pull off.  It really does call for a strong directorial hand from someone with a real understanding of the requirements of Theater of the Absurd, which too often falls into the mode of theater of the “absurd” (not the same thing.) When done well, the results can be nothing short of a breathtaking journey into a surrealistic world.  For example, quite possibly the best production of any play I have ever seen was that of Ionesco’s The Chairs, as it was done to utter perfection and with great attention to detail by the Théâtre de Complicité in London about 15 years ago. 

But this is not generally the norm with productions of absurdist plays.  At last weekend’s performance of the Stoppard play, The Seeing Place company appeared to still be working through its approach, and there was rather too much of the absurd (as in silliness) and not enough of the Absurd's alternative reality for my taste.  Since the company puts a premium on allowing its actors “the freedom to discover the story with the audience,” it is likely they will find a stronger footing before the run is through. 

Meanwhile, if you agree with Shakespeare that “the play’s the thing,” I’d recommend an evening with Hamlet.  (Just check ahead of time to make sure the air conditioning is working!)

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