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Off-Broadway Play Review—Bruce Norris’ “Downstate”

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Sunday, 27 November 2022 16:56; Written by Kevin Filipski

Downstate

Written by Bruce Norris

Directed by Pam MacKinnon

Through December 22, 2022

Playwrights Horizons

416 West 42nd Street, New York, NY

Playwrightshorizons.org

The cast of Downstate (photo: Joan Marcus)

Although Bruce Norris won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for his 2010 play Clybourne Park, I found it heavyhanded, obvious and even self-congratulatory. But his latest, Downstate, is as challenging and thought-provoking as the earlier play never was.

Downstate—which refers to southern Illinois, downstate from Chicago, and not the tri-state area here—is set in a halfway house for convicted sex offenders who have completed their prison terms. The men—Fred, Dee, Gio and Felix—have many restrictions on their lives and their movements, which are carefully monitored by their probation officer, Ivy, who is tough but not entirely unsympathetic to their plight: that basically, no one in the community wants them around, as witness the broken window near the front door or the latest admonishment, which Ivy explains to them, of them not being able to go to the closest grocery store but must get to another one, on the other side of the interstate.

The play begins with Fred, elderly and in a wheelchair, listening intently to a visiting couple—Andy and his wife Em—trying to put into words what Andy wants from him: for starters, an apology for the abuse he suffered while Fred was his piano teacher while he was a kid. There’s an immediate sense of unease that remains just under the surface throughout, and Norris adroitly adds other scenes that, while repetitive, always slightly refocus how we see these men.

Even Fred’s small electric piano, sitting in the middle of the room, is a constant reminder of what he’s done to young boys. Later, Andy returns alone to retrieve the phone he apparently forgot after his initial visit, again confronting Fred, who sits in front of that piano as Andy angrily blusters; as Dee tries, in his own way, to help Fred deal with this latest affront, Norris sympathetically balances Andy’s real hurt with Fred’s already having paid for his crime.

Downstate is an intelligent and provocative play about a problematic subject, but like Clybourne Park (if less so), it doesn’t always escape contrivance. For example, Gio conveniently brings his young Staples coworker Effie back to the house after Andy has returned and, when he finishes his showdown with Fred and Dee and tries to leave, her car is blocking Andy’s car in the yard.

Then, when she goes outside to move it, she can’t start it, returning to the house to ask if anybody has jumper cables. This leads to the play’s final desperate moments when Andy ends up wielding a baseball bat and everybody discovers what happened to Felix—who went missing after Ivy tells him she knows he broke his parole to go to the library and access the internet to contact his teenage daughter, whom he abused when she was younger.

Despite a few missteps, Norris credibly allows each of the men in the house—whose own wrongdoings have landed them there, shunned by most of society, with few if any family or friends to confide in—their humanity, having paid for what they have done but now feeling that they themselves are being wronged in some way.

The mostly exemplary acting is a great asset. Although Gabi Samels can’t do much with the underwritten role of Effie, Susanna Guzman is bluntly forceful as Ivy, Tim Hopper is a compellingly damaged Andy, and Sally Murphy makes the most of her brief stage time as Em. The four ex-cons are persuasively embodied by Eddie Torres (Felix), Glenn Davis (Gio) and—in the pivotal parts—K. Todd Freeman (Dee) and Francis Guinan (Fred). Guinan makes Fred’s ability to cozy up to his victims even decades later creepily real, while Freeman trenchantly enacts Dee’s preening as a justified defense mechanism.

Pam MacKinnon pointedly directs on Todd Rosenthal’s ultra-realistic unit set, with assists from Adam Silverman’s resourceful lighting and Carolyn Downing’s spot-on sound design. While not flawless, the unapologetically adult Downstate is worth a visit.

Sondra Radvanovsky Dazzles at Carnegie Hall

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 23 November 2022 15:04; Written by Jack Angstreich

At Carnegie Hall on the evening of Wednesday, November 16th, I had the pleasure of attending a marvelous recital—entitled “From Loss to Love”—by the superb, Canadian, operatic soprano, Sondra Radvanovsky, excellently accompanied by pianist Anthony Manoli.

The singer, whose voice was in powerful form, appeared in a fabulous black gown, opening the event with one of the greatest works in the program: Henry Purcell’s "When I am laid" from Dido and Aeneas. She followed this with Georg Friedrich Händel’s “E pur così in un giorno … Piangerò la sorte Mia" from Giulio Cesare in Egitto, which program annotator Janet E. Bedell describes as the composer’s “most popular opera.” Henri Duparc was represented by three songs, the first two set to texts by the Symbolist poet Jean Lahor: "Chanson triste" and “Extase.” The third, “Au pays où se fait la guerre,” originally titled “Absence,” from a poem by the eminent Théophile Gautier, was written for an unfinished opera. Three songs by Sergei Rachmaninoff—which Radvanovsky dedicated to the late, impossibly dashing baritone, Dmitri Hvorostovsky—were also featured. The first, “Sing not to me, beautiful maiden,” from a text by Alexander Pushkin, is from his Opus 4 of 1893, his first set of songs to be published. This was followed by “How fair this spot” from 1902 and “I wait for you” from 1894, written when the composer was twenty-one. The first half of the event concluded with Franz Liszt’s Three Petrarch Sonnets—written for tenor voice—which demonstrated the singer’s special affinity for the Italianate repertory of the Romantic movement. She sang the earliest version of this work, “first sketched in 1838 or 1839,” according to Bedell.

The second half of the program—for which the soprano wore a stunning, deep blue gown—was truly remarkable, however, beginning with four songs by Richard Strauss. Her performance of the first, “Allerseelen”—which closes his first set of published songs, his Opus 10 of 1885, when the composer was twenty-one—was one of the supreme moments of the evening and the song was one of its very finest. After “Befreit” from 1898—set to a text by the eminent German poet, Richard Dehmel—Radvanovsky reached the other peak in the recital, with the astonishing “Morgen!” from 1894. After “Heimliche Aufforderung,” the singer came into her own too with most of the Italian repertory that dominated the remainder of the evening, starting with Giuseppe Verdi’s “In solitaria stanza” from his Sei romanze of 1838, which was another highlight along with Stefano Donaudy’s “O del mio amato ben” from 1918 that immediately followed. After Verdi’s “Stornello”of 1869, the soprano concluded the program with two of her best renditions: the world premiere of contemporary American composer Jake Heggie’s “If I Had Known” to a text by Radvanovsky herself and Umberto Giordano’s aria “La mamma morta” from his celebrated opera, André Chenier. She equalled these with two encores: Francesco Cilea’s "Ecco: respiro appena... Io son l’umile ancella" from his opera Adriana Lecouvreur and what she said was her favorite aria, Giacomo Puccini’s "Vissi d'arte" from Tosca. She ended the evening with Harold Arlen’s immortal, glorious “Over the Rainbow,” set to lyrics by Yip Harburg.

Off-Broadway Play Review—Bess Wohl’s “Camp Siegfried”

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Tuesday, 22 November 2022 21:56; Written by Kevin Filipski

Camp Siegfried

Written by Bess Wohl

Directed by David Cromer

Through December 4, 2022

Second Stage Theater/Tony Kiser Theater

305 West 43rd Street, New York, NY

2st.com

Johnny Berchtold and Lily McInenery in Bess Wohl's Camp Siegfried
(photo: Emilio Madrid)

In plays like Make Believe and Grand Horizons, Bess Wohl has shown a talent for witty observational humor and an ability to dissect intriguingly off-kilter relationships, both of which are on display in her latest play, Camp Siegfried—but there’s more at stake as well, which Wohl doesn’t make entirely convincing.

Set in 1938 on Long Island, Camp Siegfried introduces two characters at its eponymous locale, as German Americans indoctrinate their children into the ethos of fascism. (The camp was real, welcoming its guests from 1936 to 1941, when the America finally entered World War II against the Axis powers.) “He” is 17, all blustery confidence, while “She” is 16, seemingly naïve and initially bemused about why she is there.

For 85 minutes, Wohl follows the pair through their days and nights at the camp, as they meet cute, become friends then lovers, and engage in menial but intensely physical work (the two performers actually build a podium from wood onstage) to meet the qualifications for being part of the Aryan master race.

Wohl’s dialogue is at its best when He and She talk about what others are telling them: what their parents and other adults, like the married teacher She had an affair with, almost offhandedly say, loaded with meaning. She recounts that a local doctor she visits said to her, “Anyone can be seduced,” which could serve as the play’s subtitle. But Wohl takes the easy way out by not dramatizing effectively enough how the drift toward fascist, racist ideology can be done so casually, offhandedly.

This is underscored by the heavily pregnant final lines of dialogue, which bluntly state what the play has been understated about all along. As in Make Believe, the relatively short running time is both a plus and a minus: although it gets Wohl’s points across economically, there’s also a sense of something missing, that the play’s 11 scenes are mere sketches for a more penetrating and resonant psychological study yet to be written.

David Cromer directs economically on Brett J. Banakis’ beautifully appointed outdoor set, complete with a hillside, gravel path and even trees, cannily lit by Tyler Micoleau. Both actors, making their New York debuts, are commanding in their teenage awkwardness: Johnny Berchtold adroitly catches He’s balancing act of a kid trying to become a man in difficult circumstances.

Even better is Lily McInerny, who gives a tremendous performance as She, an initially shy wallflower who becomes a snarling, screaming defender of “America/Germany First” lunacy at the play’s climax. Her transformation from teenager to woman in front of our and (He’s) eyes is a scarily perfect portrayal of how ideology can lead to violence that’s the most unforgettable piece of acting on a New York stage right now.

The Sounds of the Berlin Philharmonic Beomes Unstuck In Time

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Tuesday, 22 November 2022 21:00; Written by Jack Angstreich

The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Photo by Chris Lee.

At Carnegie Hall, amidst an extremely strong season of orchestral music, on the evenings of Thursday and Friday, November 10th and 11th, I had the exceptional privilege to attend two superb concerts featuring the stellar musicians of the celebrated Berlin Philharmonic under the expert direction of its Chief Conductor, Kirill Petrenko.

The outstanding first program was devoted to a finally stunning account of Gustav Mahler’s monumental, challenging and extraordinary Seventh Symphony. Program annotator Jack Sullivan comments that the composer thought this was his “best work” but adds that “it is his least performed and understood.” The first movement begins with a solemn if fraught Adagio that is soon overtaken by a turbulent Allegro; the opening funeral march periodically recurs, leading to a very brief, beautiful, song-like interlude and then a return to the gloomier musical world that preceded it. The ensuing, ingenious “Nachtmusik I” starts more playfully and acquires a more propulsive character which then becomes dance-like, and reverts to the music at the movement’s outset. The Scherzo that follows is also in a somewhat populist vein, although livelier to a degree on the whole, even joyful at times. The second “Nachtmusik” movement is unexpectedly charming—if eccentric—with a few mysterious moments. And the Rondo-Finale, the most cheerful of the movements, is initially exciting—even sometimes tumultuous—and builds to a glorious, affirmative conclusion. The artists deservedly received a very enthusiastic ovation.

Also terrific was the second concert which began with the Carnegie Hall premiere of contemporary American composer Andrew Norman’s arresting, brilliantly orchestrated Unstuck. I reproduce his note on the work as follows:

I have never been more stuck than I was in the winter of 2008. My writing came to a grinding halt in January, and for a long time this piece languished on my desk—a mess of musical fragments that refused to cohere. It was not until the following May, when I saw a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and remembered one of its iconic sentences, that I had a breakthrough realization. The sentence was this: “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time,” and the realization was that the lack of coherence in my ideas was to be embraced and explored, not overcome.

I realized that my musical materials lent themselves to a narrative arc that, like Vonnegut’s character, comes “unstuck” in time. Bits and pieces of the beginning, middle, and end of the music crop up in the wrong places like the flashbacks and flashforwards that define the structure and style of Slaughterhouse-Five.

I also realized that the word unstuck had resonances with the way that a few of the piece’s musical ideas get caught in repetitive loops. The orchestra, perhaps in some way dramatizing my own frustration with composing, spends a considerable amount of time and energy trying to free itself from these moments of stuckness.

Norman ascended to the stage to receive the audience’s acclaim.

The admirable virtuoso, Noah Bendix-Balgley, then joined the musicians for a marvelous performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s exquisite, almost Baroque, less commonly heard Violin Concerto No. 1. The opening Allegro moderato, for all its ebullience, is surprisingly serious, while the subsequent, even more remarkable Adagio is elevated, graceful and lyrical, and the brisk finale is vivacious and delightful. Abundant applause for the musicians was rewarded with a wonderful encore from the soloist: two traditional klezmer pieces—"Yismechu" and "Ot Azoy"—a genre in which Bendix-Balgley specializes.

Especially interesting, however, was the second half of the evening: a supremely confident rendition of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s striking, seldom played Symphony in F-sharp, Op. 40. The work opens very dramatically with a tension that pervades the entire movement, although there are serene passages. The Scherzo that ensues is sprightlier, if not free from agitation, with elements of grandeur, and features a more somber trio section. More Romantic is the often impassioned, but also introspective, Adagio. The finale is strange and unpredictable, with some haunting episodes, closing triumphantly. The audience responded with intense appreciation.

I look forward to the return of these tremendous artists.

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