Theater Review: "A Disappearing Number" Mostly Adds Up

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Saturday, 17 July 2010 22:49

Written by Laura Blum

Most moviegoers today believe life takes place in 3-D. Suspecting they may have a point, I took a momentary break from the cinema to catch the flesh-and-blood performance of A Disappearing Number, at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts' David H. Koch Theater in New York City.

Presented as part of the Lincoln Center Festival (July 7 to 25, 2010), it's one of 45 works by artists and ensembles from 12 countries.

The play, it turns out, makes liberal use of 2-D screens, as is the wont of English playwright and director Simon McBurney and his theater] company Complicite, with whom he shares writing and creative-juice credits for this mind-tickling piece.

McBurney had me applauding from the production notes. "Time for school, where I would understand nothing about math except that I got the wrong answer," he recalls his boyhood trauma. This was the assurance I needed to brave 110 minutes of musings about mathematics and the World War I-era collaboration between Cambridge University math
professor G. H. Hardy (David Annen) and young Indian clerk Srinivasa Ramanujan (Shane Shambhu), a raving mathematical genius.

Fortunately for numbers-challenged viewers like me, the play also ponders beauty, imagination and love, not to mention the nature of infinity and the past's link with the future.

A Disappearing Number takes its opening spark from Ramanujan's first overture to Hardy, as described in Hardy's book, A Mathematician's Apology. The then unknown quantity scrawled a letter to the tweedy don proving that 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 ... equals -1/12. At first glance Hardy figured it was the rantings of a crank, but soon recognized amid the scratchings the Riemann zeta function with s = - 1. Apparently we have all this to thank for today's cell phones and computers.

But rather than concentrate on the relationship between the plumped Brit and the pinched Brahmin, Complicite folds a present-day love
story into the mix. Contemporary audiences can relate to the gadget-wielding Indian-American businessman, Al (Firdous Bamji) and his math lecturer partner, Ruth (Saskia Reeves) without having to digest a period piece on top of demanding curriculum. And their
figure-fueled philosophical – and even geographical -- quests
certainly draw resonances with the historic pair's.

Yet the Julie and Julia device gets a bit choppy, and leaves something of an artificial aftertaste. Foretaste as well: we first encounter Ramanujan's mathematical ideas when Ruth first encounters Al, in the opening scene. Through the course of the play we will join them in fathoming the mysteries of the universe, in celebrating connectedness and in mourning the loss of a baby, a marriage and a spouse.

Too bad such character development eludes the heroic duo of Ramanujan and Hardy. Competing for our emotional allegiance, they don't stand a chance.

Fortunately, there's more than enough passion and intrigue to go around in the use of math concepts as a prism into human nature. For example, death is compared to infinity; partitions of numbers stand as a metaphor for the partition of individuals as well as of India and Pakistan; and the entropy of cadavers is matched with the decomposition of numbers into prime factors.

If math's essence is complexity at its simplest expression, Complicite can slap gold stars on their foreheads for the stark elegance of its thematic inquiry.

The narrative structure also offers a riff on math. Hopping back and forth in Al and Ruth's relationship – and across the century – teases out mathematical patterns, as do our protagonists.

Michael Levine's production design and Paul Anderson's lighting take the logic of patterns to its poetic and pulsing edge. Though at times
almost too much of a good thing, the projected infinities of calculations filled the stage with chaos' beauty and mystique.

Taken together with Nitin Sawhney's music of live tabla rhythms (played by Hiren Chate) and hypnotic chants of mathematical sequences, the play gives a sound and light show of sufficient dimensions to put any 3-D movie out there to shame.

Additional details about A Disappearing Number and the Lincoln Center Festival are posted at: www.lincolncenter.org.

A Disappearing Number
Lincoln Center Festival
July 7 to 25, 2010
David H. Koch Theater
20 Lincoln Center Plaza
(Columbus Avenue at 63rd Street)
New York, NY 10023

Kevin's Digital Week 28: Outstanding "Moments"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 15 July 2010 05:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Everlasting Moments

(Criterion)

Directed by Jan Troell — who is, at age 78, a true grand master of cinema — Everlasting Moments is both a heartening example of artistry distilled to its very essence and a riposte to the frantic shrillness of empty crowd-pleasers like Avatar and Slumdog Millionaire. With acute insight, Troell paints a loving portrait of an early 20th century woman becoming a photographer in a difficult era for her gender’s place in society. Maria Heiskanen’s subtle, nuanced portrayal creates a headstrong Maria whose picture-taking liberates her from household drudgery, even if she never fully comprehends its meaning in her life. As she takes pictures, Troell moves between comedy and tragedy, the latter in a haunting sequence of a dead girl’s mother requesting photos to remember her by. Once, at the end, Troell uses a freeze-frame to visualize a photo, and this moment—in lesser hands, a mere platitude—has great power and effectiveness.

Remarkable, too, is the sepia-soaked cinematography which appears to catch light in half-tones, as it were—the shadows dancing on these very human faces provide a visual wonderment that can’t be reproduced by any other director. Criterion’s Blu-ray transfer preserves the excess grain and muted color palette of the original 16mm shoot, a miracle in itself. Extras include cast and crew interviews, an hour-long documentary about Troell’s underrated career, and a nine-minute featurette showing Maria‘s real photos. 

The White Ribbon
(Sony)

Michael Haneke’s 145-minute melodrama about the roots of fascism is, like all his films, meticulously shot and impeccably acted: it’s also written and directed by a world-class sadist. That’s not necessarily a criticism because, as one of today’s most talented cinematic provocateurs, Haneke makes intelligently disturbing movies.

The White Ribbon is of a piece with his earlier work, showing how a German village on the eve of World War I becomes prey to unexplainable atrocities, from injuring the local doctor (and killing his horse) to blinding a retarded boy.  As usual for Haneke, the quite horrific sadism is primarily psychological, but from the director of Benny’s Video, Funny Games, and Cache, we expect that. Still, it’s a spellbinding allegory about instilling the roots of the Third Reich in children who would grow up to yell “Heil Hitler!” The White Ribbon is photographed in immaculate black and white, recreated brilliantly on Blu-ray: indeed, this may be the best-looking hi-def transfer yet. Extras include a Haneke interview, footage from the film’s Cannes premiere and a thorough, involving making-of documentary.  

DVDs of the Week

The Greatest 

(E1)

Carey Mulligan again paints an indelible portrait as memorable as her Oscar-nominated turn in An Education: she plays Rose, a young woman who insinuates herself into the grieving family of her boyfriend, who was killed in a freak accident that left her — and their unborn child — alone. Mulligan’s incisive, thought-through characterization gives this well-acted soap opera the charge it needs to overcome its mawkishness.

Pierce Brosnan and Susan Sarandon give intelligent performances as the parents reacting to their son’s surviving girlfriend and carrier of their grandchild, and Johnny Simmons is exceptionally good as their younger son. But it’s Mulligan who is the backbone of Shana Feste’s well-intentioned but frustratingly uneven exploration of grief and its aftermath. Extras include brief interviews with Feste and her cast. 

Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill
(Acorn Media)
Originally broadcast on PBS in 1975, Jennie is a supremely entertaining British mini-series about the life of Winston Churchill’s American-born mother, who is fabulously embodied by a luminous Lee Remick. Writer Julian Mitchell drew on the Churchill family’s private letters and papers, and the result — while not completely melodrama free—is a fascinating portrait of a unique and quintessentially American woman, whom Remick plays with wit, flair and stylishness.

The supporting cast of Jennie comprises top-notch British actors—including Warren Clarke, Christopher Cazenove, Siân Phillips and Jeremy Brett — who perfectly complement Remick’s winning portrayal. Presented on four discs, the seven-hour mini-series is another winner from Acorn Media, which happily seems to be releasing every storied and obscure British television program in existence. 

CDs of the Week

The Excursions of Mr. Broucek

(Supraphon)

Several towering tragedies by the great Czech opera composer Leos Janácek (Jenufa, Kata Kabanova, The Makropulos Case and From the House of the Dead) are regularly performed at the Metropolitan Opera, and his delightful The Cunning Little Vixen will be staged by the New York Philharmonic next season. But his experimental comic opera The Excursions of Mr. Broucek is barely known hereabouts, possibly because this Eastern European absurdist work is, for all its musical beauties, seriously disjointed, since its protagonist journeys to the moon in Act I and back in time to the 15th century in Act II.

Happily, a recording this good (from 1962, with superb Czech singers and players) allows the listener to bypass the clunky libretto and concentrate on Janácek’s mesmerizing way of creating compelling drama and comedy out of simple musical materials. The Excursions of Mr. Broucek is not Janácek’s best opera by a long shot—not with so many other indisputably fine ones to choose from—but it shows off a great composer’s complete mastery of his medium. 

Les Noces/Oedipus Rex
(Mariinsky Label)
Russian conductor Valery Gergiev recently led an Igor Stravinsky Festival with the New York Philharmonic, and the concerts were filled with alternately exasperating and revelatory performances of much of Stravinsky’s orchestral and choral output. Although the players on this recording are Gergiev’s hometown Mariinsky Orchestra and Chorus, the musical outcome is the same. 

The Russian composer's dance cantata Les Noces / The Wedding, which features the Mariinsky Chorus, soloists and percussionists, contains much impressive banging, while the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex stars several leather-lunged Russian singers, along with actor Gerard Depardieu speaking the narration in Jean Cocteau’s original French (here in New York, Jeremy Irons intoned E.E. Cummings’ English translation). Gergiev’s patented intensity brings each work to a shattering climax, although neither performance—however beautifully recorded—would be considered truly definitive by Stravinsky aficionados.  

Broadway Review: Crossing "Fences" with Denzel & Davis

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 29 June 2010 16:43

Written by Lucy Komisar

Written by August Wilson
Directed by Kenny Leon
Starring Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Mykelti Williamson, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Chris Chalk

What happens when the victim becomes the victimizer? When a man's spirit is so thwarted that he turns hard in his soul and becomes so self-centered that he can't love or care for anyone else? It's the message of August Wilson's tough 1983 play set in the late fifties that attempts to explain the dysfunctional working class black men who were being studied to death.

Denzel Washington as Tony Maxson and Viola Davis as his wife Rose are tragic figures who encompass desperate desires to get ahead and heartbreaking experiences of failure. They shine in director Kenny Leon's production that at once tugs at your heart and makes you furious. Leon directed August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean and Radio Golf on Broadway and knows very well how to mine circumstances in the playwright's work that bring forth both sympathy and dismay.

The setting is Wilson's Pittsburgh, this time 1957, at a shabby brick house with a back porch and paved over yard, a tall maple planted in the hard dirt and concrete as if to emphasize that this space that ought to be for grass and shrubs is sterile. Close next door is a similar red brick two-story home. The set is by Santo Loquasto.

Troy, who is 53 and working on a garbage truck, vents his anger at racism to his co-worker and friend, Jim Bono (Stephen McKinley Henderson, who has become a necessary featured actor in Wilson's works). Troy complains that the whites get to drive the trucks while blacks haul the garbage cans. He refers in a dreamy way to the time when he played minor league baseball. Even that didn't work out. He grumbles that white men won't let him get anywhere. Washington gives a brilliant performance as a man eaten away by anger and resentment.

His isn't the only family tragedy. Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson), his brother, has a plate in his head from a war wound and now hallucinates. He gets some welfare, but not the care he deserves. (Of course, the Veterans Administration is famous for the bad treatment given veterans of all races.) Gabe says he's gone to heaven and seen St. Peter. He imagines he chases Hell hounds, and he carries a trumpet for Judgment Day. Is that an ironic reference to the Biblical Gabriel and his horn? (The real, fine trumpet music is composed by jazz musician Branford Marsalis.)

But Wilson is not writing agitprop. This story is complex, and there's blame to go around. On the down side, Troy's past includes some dicey events in the years before he played baseball. And his stony emotional failure repeats the lack of love his felt from his father. In a grabbing moment, he repeats that failure with his own son, Cory (played with subtly controlled emotion by Chris Chalk), who has dreams of accepting a football scholarship that will get him to college. "How come you never liked me?" Cory asks.

Troy's inability to understand the meaning of love leads to the betrayal of his wife Rose, played with tenderness and strength by Viola Davis. Yet, Wilson knows how to pull survival out of the family tragedies, overcoming the "dysfunctions" that sociologists are still studying. That may account for the enthusiasm of black audiences who see heroism through the pain.

Fences
Cort Theatre
138 West 48th Street
New York, New York
(212) 239-6200
Opened April 26, 2010; closes July 11, 2010

For more by Lucy Komisar: TheKomisarScoop.com

[Photos: Joan Marcus]