The Plays of Summer

Shakespeare Dallas opens the forty-first season of Shakespeare in the Park on Wednesday, June 13th. This year, the plays are Twelfth Night and Coriolanus. One of my favorite plays, Twelfth Night plays the first week, June 13th through the 17th. Coriolanus has its opening week starting on the 21st and running through the 24th. Thereafter, Twelfth Night plays on Tuesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, with Coriolanus on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, through July 21st.

Twelfth Night is directed by Raphael Parry, the Shakespeare Dallas artistic director. He always does a great job. Cyrano de Bergerac was inspired, last summer. He is also a gifted actor, as he showed with his turn as Polonius in Hamlet. Coriolanus is being directed by René Moreno, a very imaginative and creative director. He directed last summer's excellent version of As You Like It and the superb version of Hamlet last fall. Although this is one of the more obscure plays in the Bard's oeuvre, I am quite looking forward to it. There's an opening reception for Poet's Society members on the 23rd, so we will get a talk on the play and a backstage tour. It's always interesting to see the back of the set.

Shakespeare in the Park is a great way to spend an evening, even in the heat of a Dallas summer. The plays start at 8:15 pm; the sun goes down behind the trees by 7:30 or 7:45, and it is starting to get dark before the play commences. A picnic supper and a bottle of wine is the perfect start. For the Fourth of July, they usually do an extended intermission so that people can watch the Fair Park fireworks just across the freeway.

One last plug for my favorite arts organization in Dallas: membership. It's a great deal - I saw seventeen performances last year, all for free. Members also get preferred seating, so one can get right up at the front of the stage, if that's your thing. There are also special events for members, including the Spring Soiree (previously the Bard's Birthday Bash) and several behind-the-scenes events that were put on just for members.

See you in the park!

Frankenstein is coming...

...to the Angelika.  The National Theatre Live program is reprising its broadcast of the play Frankenstein which they did last year.  The play was a hug hit in London, playing to packed houses.  It will be shown again at the Angelika on June 7th (Thursday) at 7pm with Jonny Lee Miller as Frankenstein and Benedict Cumberbatch as the Creature, and on June 9th at 2pm with those roles reversed.

This play is quite true to the original Mary Shelley tale, very much a story about what it means to be human - and about the consequences of hubris and ill-considered actions.  The atmosphere has a strong steampunk influence.

The acting, the direction, and the production design are top-notch.  If there is anything in the area that I would call must-see, this is it.  If you can get there, do not miss it.

I've seen NT Live presentations of King Lear (starring Derek Jacobi), The Cherry Orchard, One Man, Two Guvnors (an adaptation of The Servant of Two Masters), The Comedy of Errors and a couple of others, in addition to both versions of Frankenstein. The quality has been uniformly superb.  The entire series is highly recommended for anyone who likes theater.

The Birthday Party

If you did not see this play at the Undermain Theatre, it's too late. It closed last night. I saw it on Friday. The play was good, but I did not find it as enjoyable as God of Carnage the night before. Much like modern art, it is a modern play and demands some thought and experience. It would have been better had I had the opportunity to see it more than once; I regret not being able to get there earlier in its run.

The Birthday Party is one of Nobel winner Harold Pinter's early plays, and it typifies his "comedy of menace" works. The play is set in a seaside boarding house in England, run by an older couple (Meg and Petey Boles). Stanley is their only boarder. One day, two men come to the boarding house, apparently looking for Stanley. They tell the couple that it is Stanley's birthday (which he later denies), setting the stage for an oddly tense and off-kilter birthday party that night. Goldberg and McCann appear to be organized-crime figures of some sort, and Stanley fears them from the start, but the exact story behind their collective presence never becomes clear. Rather, the play focuses on the immediate relationships between the characters, and how they evolve under stress.

As has been my experience at the Undermain in the past, the actors all did an excellent job with their roles. Bruce DuBose, who I last saw in Beckett's Endgame, is quite good as Goldberg - suave, deceptive, callous, and menacing. Marcus Stimac was also good at the somewhat more thuggish McCann. His menace is of the somewhat more direct variety, combined with unpredictablility and obtuseness. I have seen him in a couple of different roles with Shakespeare Dallas. Gregory Lush does an excellent job as Stanley, by turns intimidated and rebelling against it. Driven by both cowardice and anger, he is the foil against which the other characters play (for the most part). As the Boles, Mary Lang and T. A. Taylor do a good job protraying a down to earth English couple. They do not always know what is going on, but they carry on. Lulu has proably the fewest lines of the six characters, but Katherine Bourne hits it perfectly. As a young woman in a shifting emotional landscape, she is protrayed very well. I look forward to seeing more of Ms. Bourne in the future.

I will be looking to see another version of The Birthday Party when I can. This one was enjoyable, but it definitely bears watching again.

Next up for the Undermain is a staged reading of a portion of Ulysses at the Dallas Museum of Art on Bloomsday, June 16th. I plan to be there.

God of Carnage

Carnage, indeed. Take four people, two couples, and put them together in a stressful situation, and watch the veneer of civility fall away. God of Carnage has played to great reviews in many places, and this production did not disappoint.

Alan and Annette's eleven-year-old son has bloodied the face of Michael and Veronica's son of the same age, and knocked out two of his teeth in a fairly typical childhood altercation. They all meet at Michael and Veronica's house to talk through the dispute. At first, things are cordial and everyone is effusively agreeable. But bumps in the road appear soon enough, and the situation deteriorates into a morass of sniping, shifting alliances, name-calling, and assorted ugliness. Each parent strives to outdo the others in meanness and pettiness. This would not seem to be an appealing story, but this dark comedy never loses sight of the ridiculousness inherent in adults ending up in the same sort of conflict that ended badly for their sons.

I will not indulge in spoilers, save to say that there are two very physical moments on which the play turns. Pay attention - you will want to catch them as they are happening.

All four actors do a wonderful job with their roles. Sally Nystuen-Vahle plays Annette, the initially meek wife of cell phone-wedded lawyer Alan, extermely well. Her character does change over the course of the play, and she manages the transitions with remarkable authenticity, keeping the character at a believable level while exploting the comedy of the deteriorating situation. Chris Hury also does an excellent job as the supercilious Alan, who is condescending to attend this little meeting when he clearly has more important things to do. I've had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Hury in several roles in Shakespeare Dallas productions over the last two years (Posthumous Leonatus in Cymbeline, the title role in Cyrano de Bergerac, and Laertes in Hamlet), as well as in August, Osage County at the Watertower Theater, and he does a consistently good job in his roles. In this one, he succeeds in making a character who is thoroughly unlikeable a pleasure to watch.

Veronica is perhaps the character who most believes in the initial civility. While Annette accepts it because that is how she was taught to behave, Alan pretends to it as long as it is to his advantage, and Michael wants to believe in it but isn't sure he belongs there, Veronica believes fervently in civility and the higher benefits of civilization in general. She is writing a book about Darfur, and one has the sense that she really believes that she can change the world. After seeing Christine Vela in a couple of productions as the Kitchen Dog Theater, most notably a wonderful version of Macbeth last year, I was looking forward to seeing her in this play. I was not disappointed in the slightest; she did a superb job with her character. Completely believable, and you really feel her disappointment as things come apart.

As Michael, Hassan El-Amin succeeds in bringing out the conflicted nature of the character quite well. More of a self-made man, he is a hardware entrepreneur who is a bit intimidated by Alan the high-powered lawyer. In fact, he is somewhat intimidated by all of the other three characters - but he nevertheless holds his own when things get nasty. His role is a hard one, but it is played very well. As we learn more about him, he becomes in some ways more sympathetic and in some ways less. I am impressed by the skill with which El-Amin handles this role.

A couple of notes on specifc things: I have a bottle of English Harbor Antigua Rum on my shelf, and it is very good stuff. Also, mind the hamster.

I would characterize God of Carnage as darky hilarious. It is funny and moving as only the best plays are, and the production does every justice to its source material. As much as any play I've seen, I would call this a must-see production. The Dallas Theater Center production of God of Carnage is playing at the Kalita Humphreys Theater for another two weeks, through June 17th. Don't miss it.