Erik Rhea, Katherine Bickford, Sarah Daum and Calder
Johnson rehearsing Caryl Churchill's Cloud 9 at HSU.
Showing posts with label Caryl Churchill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Caryl Churchill. Show all posts
Friday, February 23, 2007
On the North Coast
Cloud 9 at HSU
Opening night of the HSU production of Cloud 9 answered some of the questions posed and implied in my previous post. Would this production be funny? Would it solve the second act problem? The answer in both cases is yes.
The Thursday night audience was about half the capacity of Gist, but the laughter was there. Even for those who might have been somewhat bewildered or dismayed by the lifestyles portrayed and point of view expressed, there was enough showmanship and built-in comedy of (in particular) males playing females that the author's intended style--comic--could take hold anyway. And there were enough people in the audience whose laughter was raucous and infectious to bouy that mood. That permission to laugh is important, because it provides access to the deeper sources of humor, and without that the play loses half its life and much of its general humanity.
In my previous experience of the play and in reviews of other productions I've read, I've found that the second act has been difficult to carry off successfully. The HSU production did it partly with a crisp pace and directness. But I suspect it succeeded also because the first act was not as funny as it could be.
The second act problem may be inherent in the difference between the two acts. The Victorians in Africa of the first act are so hypocritical and unconscious that they can easily be played as hysterically funny caricactures. But in the second act, set in modern London, the characters are "liberated," conscious--and very self-conscious-- of sex and gender roles and freedom, and the comedy is more ironic (though there is a scene or two of farce.) The problem is that the comic potential of the first act is so extreme that the second act will pale by comparison.
In this production, though, the temptation to make the first act as hysterically hilarious as it could be is avoided, and so there isn't the great letdown with the lower octane comedy of the second act. The play works better as a whole. If this was the director's intention, it works great. If it wasn't, it works great anyway.
That's also important because there are moments of drama and shocking intensity in both acts, that can have a revelatory effect in the midst of comedy, but not in the midst of tedium.
I also wrote about accents in that last post, and I'm pleased to report that on the whole they work well here. There is a contemporary middle class lilt to them in Act II--particularly Tisha Sloane's--and an appropriate contrast to the more formal dictions of the Imperial Victorians in Act I.
The characters in both acts are extreme, yet very human. While I mentioned Churchill's irony, seeing the second act reminds me how that irony is grounded in her humanity. The most touching moment for me was the conversation between the gay young man (whose speech about his promiscuous lifestyle may remind us that this play was written before AIDS) and the mother of the man he had been living with. Though fraught with misunderstandings and revelations, it ends up in a simple friendship beyond age, gender or sex. (It also seems very English.)
Opening night jitters aside, the cast was uniformly entertaining. Erik Rhea was a crowd favorite as the colonial wife, Betty, and his switch to Edward, the gay son who decides he's a Lesbian, was also very well and sympathetically performed. Tisha Sloane had a lot of quick changes of clothes and character in the first act, and a difficult role in the second--she was excellent throughout, with real depth to her characterization of Victoria in Act II.
By giving us real characters quickly, Sarah Daum, Katherine Bickford, Alex Gradine, Missy Hopper and Calder Johnson not only gave audiences what they needed to enter the play, they provided the great after-effect of musing on the connections between the characters they played in Act I with those they played in Act II. They are also to be saluted for their courage in taking on these parts and bringing the energy and commitment to them that brought them alive. Gradine had one monster speech, unlike anything else in the play, and he delivered it effectively. Perhaps even more impressively, The older Betty in Act II also had long speeches which verge on dithering at first, but her sincerity becomes something of the moral center of the play. So Katherine Bickford had to walk a fine line to make her credible, which she admirably did.
The set design, the music (especially the singing), lighting and the other elements of the production all worked to create these twin imagined worlds. Once you get used to his characteristic style of placing actors at a distance from each other to essentially declaim their lines, all the better to make stage pictures and navigate symbolic spaces, John Heckel's direction works well for this play. I thought he'd lost a lot of the bitter comedy in Brecht's Mother Courage last year with this style, but here it works, at least in conjunction with the non-Brechtian acting this cast accomplishes. I'm not sure the added cross-casting of Martin in Act II worked to fully illuminate that character and his role in the melange, but that amounts to a quibble.
Win, lose or draw, HSU productions bring plays and styles of theatre that aren't otherwise available on the North Coast. Theatre here would really be unbalanced and incomplete without it.
Cloud 9 continues at HSU on Saturday (Feb. 24) and next weekend, Thursday through Saturday (March 1-3) at 7:30 in Gist Hall Theatre.
Opening night of the HSU production of Cloud 9 answered some of the questions posed and implied in my previous post. Would this production be funny? Would it solve the second act problem? The answer in both cases is yes.
The Thursday night audience was about half the capacity of Gist, but the laughter was there. Even for those who might have been somewhat bewildered or dismayed by the lifestyles portrayed and point of view expressed, there was enough showmanship and built-in comedy of (in particular) males playing females that the author's intended style--comic--could take hold anyway. And there were enough people in the audience whose laughter was raucous and infectious to bouy that mood. That permission to laugh is important, because it provides access to the deeper sources of humor, and without that the play loses half its life and much of its general humanity.
In my previous experience of the play and in reviews of other productions I've read, I've found that the second act has been difficult to carry off successfully. The HSU production did it partly with a crisp pace and directness. But I suspect it succeeded also because the first act was not as funny as it could be.
The second act problem may be inherent in the difference between the two acts. The Victorians in Africa of the first act are so hypocritical and unconscious that they can easily be played as hysterically funny caricactures. But in the second act, set in modern London, the characters are "liberated," conscious--and very self-conscious-- of sex and gender roles and freedom, and the comedy is more ironic (though there is a scene or two of farce.) The problem is that the comic potential of the first act is so extreme that the second act will pale by comparison.
In this production, though, the temptation to make the first act as hysterically hilarious as it could be is avoided, and so there isn't the great letdown with the lower octane comedy of the second act. The play works better as a whole. If this was the director's intention, it works great. If it wasn't, it works great anyway.
That's also important because there are moments of drama and shocking intensity in both acts, that can have a revelatory effect in the midst of comedy, but not in the midst of tedium.
I also wrote about accents in that last post, and I'm pleased to report that on the whole they work well here. There is a contemporary middle class lilt to them in Act II--particularly Tisha Sloane's--and an appropriate contrast to the more formal dictions of the Imperial Victorians in Act I.
The characters in both acts are extreme, yet very human. While I mentioned Churchill's irony, seeing the second act reminds me how that irony is grounded in her humanity. The most touching moment for me was the conversation between the gay young man (whose speech about his promiscuous lifestyle may remind us that this play was written before AIDS) and the mother of the man he had been living with. Though fraught with misunderstandings and revelations, it ends up in a simple friendship beyond age, gender or sex. (It also seems very English.)
Opening night jitters aside, the cast was uniformly entertaining. Erik Rhea was a crowd favorite as the colonial wife, Betty, and his switch to Edward, the gay son who decides he's a Lesbian, was also very well and sympathetically performed. Tisha Sloane had a lot of quick changes of clothes and character in the first act, and a difficult role in the second--she was excellent throughout, with real depth to her characterization of Victoria in Act II.
By giving us real characters quickly, Sarah Daum, Katherine Bickford, Alex Gradine, Missy Hopper and Calder Johnson not only gave audiences what they needed to enter the play, they provided the great after-effect of musing on the connections between the characters they played in Act I with those they played in Act II. They are also to be saluted for their courage in taking on these parts and bringing the energy and commitment to them that brought them alive. Gradine had one monster speech, unlike anything else in the play, and he delivered it effectively. Perhaps even more impressively, The older Betty in Act II also had long speeches which verge on dithering at first, but her sincerity becomes something of the moral center of the play. So Katherine Bickford had to walk a fine line to make her credible, which she admirably did.
The set design, the music (especially the singing), lighting and the other elements of the production all worked to create these twin imagined worlds. Once you get used to his characteristic style of placing actors at a distance from each other to essentially declaim their lines, all the better to make stage pictures and navigate symbolic spaces, John Heckel's direction works well for this play. I thought he'd lost a lot of the bitter comedy in Brecht's Mother Courage last year with this style, but here it works, at least in conjunction with the non-Brechtian acting this cast accomplishes. I'm not sure the added cross-casting of Martin in Act II worked to fully illuminate that character and his role in the melange, but that amounts to a quibble.
Win, lose or draw, HSU productions bring plays and styles of theatre that aren't otherwise available on the North Coast. Theatre here would really be unbalanced and incomplete without it.
Cloud 9 continues at HSU on Saturday (Feb. 24) and next weekend, Thursday through Saturday (March 1-3) at 7:30 in Gist Hall Theatre.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Stage Matters Online
Equal Opportunity Humor
by William S. Kowinski
Caryl Churchill, author of Cloud 9, which will be presented at HSU beginning this week, is that anomaly of the celebrity age: an unknown major playwright. Tony Kushner has called her the greatest living English playwright, and her plays are done often in North America, not only in places with San Francisco values (like San Francisco), but (this spring alone) at the University of Pittsburgh and my alma mater, Knox College in downstate Illinois.
Still, “everybody knows Tom Stoppard but hardly anyone knows Caryl Churchill,” said the artistic director of a Philadelphia theatre which completed a Stoppard play and was beginning a Churchill festival. The comparison is apt, since they both hit the British theatre scene at about the same time, in the heady, flashy, London swings, everything-is-possible, late 1960s. Some of their differences may also suggest why Churchill is less known: she was more experimental, more openly collaborative, more political from the beginning, and more pioneering and radical in the ideas she played with. She was also the first woman playwright to be produced at the Royal Court Theatre, which became her artistic home.
That’s also meant that most discussion of Churchill has been in the various academic permutations of gender studies, cultural semiotics and political analysis. But while her plays have taken the lead in consciously and courageously confronting such issues, what often gets lost in all the ideology and specialized jargon is what a skilled, daring, energetic, witty and generous playwright she is.
I’ve had a good time reading some of her plays this week. There’s quite a variety--she wrote contemporary and historical dramas and comedies, radio and television plays, adaptations, stage plays that emphasized movement or song as well as those that depended on dialogue, etc. But what stands out about them all is how she expresses the irony of real life.
One difficulty may be that her plays are notoriously hard to stage. I’ve seen three productions, one of Mad Forest and two of Cloud 9, including its original New York staging, directed by Tommy Tune. I remember that production as having a dynamite first act, and a confusing second act. Cloud 9 is especially difficult because the two acts are so different: the first (which takes place in 19th century colonial Africa) verges on caricature, while the second (in modern London) is more naturalistic in tone.
Part of the problem may be the language difference. (Don’t laugh—one Churchill play was partly inspired by the different pronunciation of “ice cream” in England and America.) English English depends a great deal on class, place and time period. While the Brits in Act I may adopt upper class accents of the Queen’s English because they represent England in an African outpost of the Empire, they are basically middle class. If they were nobility, they wouldn’t be posted deep in the heart of darkness. The characters in Act II are openly urban middle class, and so their accents aren’t of the posh Masterpiece Theatre sort.
This may be difficult for Americans to grasp, but it affects the rhythms. It also reflects the differences of the characters: those in Act I are pretending and repressing, with tragic and hilarious results, while those in Act II (metaphorically the grown-up children of Act I) are aware of the issues and are trying to deal with them, though with residual and therefore hilarious bits of unconsciousness. That the second act takes place on a playground suggests the innocence and exploration of new roles and rules across generations, as well as anticipating pratfalls.
[text continues after photo]
by William S. Kowinski
Caryl Churchill, author of Cloud 9, which will be presented at HSU beginning this week, is that anomaly of the celebrity age: an unknown major playwright. Tony Kushner has called her the greatest living English playwright, and her plays are done often in North America, not only in places with San Francisco values (like San Francisco), but (this spring alone) at the University of Pittsburgh and my alma mater, Knox College in downstate Illinois.
Still, “everybody knows Tom Stoppard but hardly anyone knows Caryl Churchill,” said the artistic director of a Philadelphia theatre which completed a Stoppard play and was beginning a Churchill festival. The comparison is apt, since they both hit the British theatre scene at about the same time, in the heady, flashy, London swings, everything-is-possible, late 1960s. Some of their differences may also suggest why Churchill is less known: she was more experimental, more openly collaborative, more political from the beginning, and more pioneering and radical in the ideas she played with. She was also the first woman playwright to be produced at the Royal Court Theatre, which became her artistic home.
That’s also meant that most discussion of Churchill has been in the various academic permutations of gender studies, cultural semiotics and political analysis. But while her plays have taken the lead in consciously and courageously confronting such issues, what often gets lost in all the ideology and specialized jargon is what a skilled, daring, energetic, witty and generous playwright she is.
I’ve had a good time reading some of her plays this week. There’s quite a variety--she wrote contemporary and historical dramas and comedies, radio and television plays, adaptations, stage plays that emphasized movement or song as well as those that depended on dialogue, etc. But what stands out about them all is how she expresses the irony of real life.
One difficulty may be that her plays are notoriously hard to stage. I’ve seen three productions, one of Mad Forest and two of Cloud 9, including its original New York staging, directed by Tommy Tune. I remember that production as having a dynamite first act, and a confusing second act. Cloud 9 is especially difficult because the two acts are so different: the first (which takes place in 19th century colonial Africa) verges on caricature, while the second (in modern London) is more naturalistic in tone.
Part of the problem may be the language difference. (Don’t laugh—one Churchill play was partly inspired by the different pronunciation of “ice cream” in England and America.) English English depends a great deal on class, place and time period. While the Brits in Act I may adopt upper class accents of the Queen’s English because they represent England in an African outpost of the Empire, they are basically middle class. If they were nobility, they wouldn’t be posted deep in the heart of darkness. The characters in Act II are openly urban middle class, and so their accents aren’t of the posh Masterpiece Theatre sort.
This may be difficult for Americans to grasp, but it affects the rhythms. It also reflects the differences of the characters: those in Act I are pretending and repressing, with tragic and hilarious results, while those in Act II (metaphorically the grown-up children of Act I) are aware of the issues and are trying to deal with them, though with residual and therefore hilarious bits of unconsciousness. That the second act takes place on a playground suggests the innocence and exploration of new roles and rules across generations, as well as anticipating pratfalls.
[text continues after photo]
Caryl Churchill Continued
Certainly the content of gender identity and sexual repression as it relates to political power and social violence created difficulties for audiences in the 80s, when this play premiered over here. Men playing women pretending to be men was a Shakespearian era convention, but Churchill used gender-bending casting to explore and confront these issues. But even with the alarming ascent of reactionary fundamentalism, audiences today are better prepared to see what Churchill is getting at, and to get the jokes.
On the other hand, I can appreciate the weariness of those who feel they are constantly being told that the world is so awful because of people of their color, class, gender and/or sexuality. What I especially appreciate about Churchill is that I never feel demonized, and in the sense of trying to be part of the solution, I never feel excluded. I think this is partly due to how she links gender and racial prejudices to sexual repression generally, which seems accurate, and it makes the play more universal. But mostly I’m guessing it’s the irony in her writing and stagecraft. Irony is an equal opportunity deflator and illuminator.
The HSU production of Cloud 9, directed by John Heckel, begins in the Gist Hall Theatre this Thursday for a two-weekend run. If you are automatically offended by bad words, outrageous ideas and sexual situations in unconventional permutations, don’t go. You can find more information at http://Cloud9HSU.blogspot.com, including comments by the director. I put the blog together as the HSU Theatre, Film & Dance department publicist. The views expressed there represent the department. The views expressed here, as always, represent nobody but me.
On the other hand, I can appreciate the weariness of those who feel they are constantly being told that the world is so awful because of people of their color, class, gender and/or sexuality. What I especially appreciate about Churchill is that I never feel demonized, and in the sense of trying to be part of the solution, I never feel excluded. I think this is partly due to how she links gender and racial prejudices to sexual repression generally, which seems accurate, and it makes the play more universal. But mostly I’m guessing it’s the irony in her writing and stagecraft. Irony is an equal opportunity deflator and illuminator.
The HSU production of Cloud 9, directed by John Heckel, begins in the Gist Hall Theatre this Thursday for a two-weekend run. If you are automatically offended by bad words, outrageous ideas and sexual situations in unconventional permutations, don’t go. You can find more information at http://Cloud9HSU.blogspot.com, including comments by the director. I put the blog together as the HSU Theatre, Film & Dance department publicist. The views expressed there represent the department. The views expressed here, as always, represent nobody but me.
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