Is He Mellower? Ask the Guy Missing a Hand

C M Y K Sxxx,2010-03-07,AR,006,Bs-4C,E1

6 AR THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, MARCH 7, 2010

THEATER Is He Mellower? Ask the Guy Missing a Hand

By JASON ZINOMAN OUR years ago Martin McDonagh, the celebrated playwright whose flamboyantly gruesome dark com- F edies have brought smashed skulls, child murder and other carefully calibrat- ed outrages to Broadway, shocked the theater world in an entirely new way. At the height of his creative powers and popularity, he decided to quit the stage while he was on top. Explaining that he was repeating himself and needed to do some growing up, he told The New Yorker, “I’ve said enough as a young dramatist.” He was 35. His early retirement didn’t last long. Af- The playwright Martin ter writing screenplays and directing his first feature, the cult hit “In Bruges,” Mr. McDonagh, above McDonagh, who turns 40 this month, has right, has unretired returned with “A Behanding in Spokane,” a with “A Behanding in work he wrote last year that shows no Spokane,” featuring, signs of mellowing adulthood. below right, Zoe Running at the Gerald Schoenfeld Thea- Kazan, Christopher ter, the politically incorrect thriller follows CHESTER HIGGINS JR./THE NEW YORK TIMES a racist psychotic played by Christopher Walken and Anthony Walken who threatens to kill two small- Mackie. this gambit is a series of familiar McDo- it would be amazing, especially for a play- that? Just stop being so lazy. What century time crooks (Zoe Kazan and Anthony nagh elements: airborne body parts, unex- wright. They would always remember is this?” Mackie) unless they returning his missing pectedly sensitive killers and a propulsive, you.” He is also dreaming of America more hand as promised. Reflecting on his show outlandish plot. And once he finished a Mr. McDonagh said that working in film than ever, in his work and life. He has little during a recent interview, Mr. McDonagh draft, he realized that he couldn’t just stick had made him more ruthless in editing (“A positive to say about his home city, Lon- ONLINE: ARCHIVES said with a laugh, “I realize that I am nev- it in a drawer. “I was going to do a Salinger Behanding” is 90 minutes) and increas- don, which he calls “the rudest place.” As er going to grow up.” Past coverage of the and disappear,” he said. “Then I thought, I ingly determined to show, not tell. “There’s for its theater scene, putting it in the con- In 1994, in less than 10 months, Mr. work of Martin want to have some fun.” nothing that you can’t show onstage,” he text of soccer, he compares the British McDonagh banged out his first seven Sitting in the theater district restaurant McDonagh, including said. stage to “Greek second division.” In his plays while sequestered in a house in an Angus McIndoe, Mr. McDonagh appeared reviews and photos: formulation, New York is the World Cup. Irish neighborhood of London. He de- boyishly handsome with a can’t-help-my- “Movies do that, they tell you,” he add- scribed their animating theatrical philoso- nytimes.com/theater self grin that accompanies the most reck- ed, shaking his head. “Why can’t you do Continued on Following Page phy simply: “Guns. Explosions. Blood.” lessly candid sense of humor to be found in For the next dozen years these entertain- a Broadway playwright. After a few drinks ing works, from “The Beauty Queen of he mused merrily about what would hap- Leenane” (which he wrote in eight days) pen if the elderly woman sitting at a near- to his most ambitious drama, “The Pillow- by table pulled out a firearm and started man” (written in two and a half weeks), shooting. If this reporter was killed, he were produced in London and then New York, with the exception of “The Banshees of Inisheer,” a portrait of an aging writer After a break, Martin with declining skills that Mr. McDonagh McDonagh returns to wants to revisit when he’s older. When he started working on “Behand- Broadway and playwriting, ing,” he said, he intended to recreate his original burst of artistic inspiration but guns blazing. found himself quickly paralyzed. After all, he wasn’t some unknown writer anymore. said, he would volunteer to finish the arti- There were expectations to live up to. “So I cle. “He was having fun when his face got decided I’m just going to write something shot off” is how his tribute would go. trashy,” he confessed. “It could be a runt of As for dying, the worst way, he said with a story, which it is, in a good way.” the sureness of a man who had given the Mr. McDonagh began with the image of question serious consideration, is to be tor- a man shooting a gun into a closet, where tured to death. The best? Eaten by a lion. the audience could hear the sound of some- Wouldn’t that actually involve terrible pain one struggling inside: Gun? Check. Explo- and suffering? “Sure, at the time,” he said sion? Check. Blood? Probably. Following matter-of-factly. “Fifty years down the line SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES With Turturro, Italy Knows No Bounds

By FRANZ LIDZ MILAN ROM a stony redoubt on a stage in the Piccolo Teatro Strehler, John Turturro smiles faintly and presses F the palms of his hands together between his knees. Mr. Turturro — born in Queens, living in Brooklyn — is playing an unscrupulous innkeeper in “Fiabe italiane” (“Italian Folk Tales”), a powerfully imagined parable he also directs and has freely adapted from fables collected by Ita- lo Calvino, Giambattista Basile and Giu- seppe Pitrè. Mr. Turturro studies a fool (Max Casel- la) who has just arrived at the inn with a magical donkey. The fool asks him to give the beast food and fresh water and cau- tions him not to say “ass dump” in its pres- ence. Though the innkeeper instructs his wife not to utter the phrase, she blurts it out anyway, causing the donkey to bray, raise its tail and shower the ground with jewels. While upbraiding her for repeating the incantation, the innkeeper repeats it himself. Which prompts a second cascade. “O.K., everyone!” says the fool, at which point he invokes the magical words. Pres- to: Another shimmering load. The donkey dung scene derives from Basile’s “Racconto dell’Orco” and “Ari-ari, Ciuco Mio, Butta Danari!,” No. 127 of the 200 yarns in Calvino’s popular folklore an- thology, published in 1956. In the book’s in- troduction, Calvino quotes a Tuscan prov- erb: “The tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it.” Mr. Turturro, a veteran of dozens of Off Broadway plays and scores of Hollywood movies, added elements that would not be out of place in commedia dell’arte, the an- cient Italian improv theater. His production, which last month concluded a sold- GIANNI FIORITO out tour of Turin, Naples and Milan, fea- tured minstrels, two overlapping stories, grace and humility and reflect an Italy Italian authors have never even been liano. “I had studied Italian for three From left, Richard layers of language (English, Italian, West- without borders, an Italy more of a conti- translated into English,” he lamented. “In months,” Mr. Turturro recalled, “and when Easton, Max Casella, ern Lombardian, Sicilian, Neapolitan, nent.” the United States being of Italian descent I got to Sicily, I was completely lost.” John Turturro, Aida Piedmontese, Abruzzese) and characters Like one of Mr. Turturro’s favorite films, is not a broadening experience. It’s nar- A half century ago Mr. Giuliano was the blissfully free of self-consciousness. Vittorio De Sica’s neo-Realist fairy tale rowing, in that you’re rarely exposed to subject of a groundbreaking piece of politi- Turturro and Diego Bathed in a palette of unlikely yet sump- “Miracle in Milan” (1951), the stories wed the depth and diversity of Italian culture. cal filmmaking by Francesco Rosi, the ac- Turturro, in “Fiabe tuous color combinations, ogresses posed fantasy to the everyday. “They’re the American culture is so flattened. I’m not so claimed Neapolitan director. Mr. Rosi was Italiane” (“Italian Folk as lovely maidens, ghouls vanished into naïve tales of peasants trying to make interested in being made into a pancake so taken by Mr. Turturro’s turn as a throt- Tales”), on tour last enchanted sacks, and princes sprang from sense of their lives,” he said. “They at- anymore.” tled playwright in the Coen brothers’ “Bar- month in Turin, giant talking crabs. As often happens in tempt to give hope to those who have He is interested in having his production ton Fink” (1991) that he asked him to play tales of transformation, power is eventu- none.” And despite their age, the fables re- of “Italian Folk Tales” restaged in a New the lead in “La Tregua” (“The Truce”). Naples and Milan. ally tempered with responsibility, and the main remarkably fresh. “Bernie Madoff — York theater, however. “It would be nice to “The film is ironic and grotesque,” Mr. cruel realities of existence cede to purity, greedy, irresponsible, only out for himself present this aspect of Italy that isn’t seen Rosi told him, “and I feel you have both.” virtue and rectitude. — is an echo of some of the tricksters and very often in the states,” he said. Six years in the making, “La Tregua” was “Calvino said that folk tales are a gen- deceivers,” he said. The play is just the latest expedition in based on Primo Levi’s account of his post- eral representation of life,” Mr. Turturro, Mr. Turturro grows lyrical discussing Mr. Turturro’s midlife exploration of his war odyssey back to Turin from Ausch- 53, said over plates of osso bucco and risot- the “continuous quiver of love” that runs ancestral land. The journey began in 1986 witz. to Milanese at a trattoria near the Duomo. through the stories. He loves Italy with a during the filming of “The Sicilian,” Mi- Mr. Rosi, in turn, gave Mr. Turturro a “I find the economy and beauty of these passion that perhaps only the children of chael Cimino’s murky meditation on the translation of Eduardo De Filippo’s senti- stories quite irresistible. They’re full of immigrants are capable of. “Many great life of the notorious outlaw Salvatore Giu- Continued on Page 9 C M Y K Sxxx,2010-03-07,AR,009,Bs-4C,E1

THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, MARCH 7, 2010 AR 9

THEATER The Screen’s Now Setting Many a Stage

By ANITA GATES T “The Orphans’ Home Cycle” titles and dates move across the screen like “Star Wars” credits taking a A detour. At “Fela!” newspaper headlines like “Fela Declares Self ‘Black Power Man’” pop up on a screen. Even at “Safe Home,” a low-budget, bare-bones production that opened Off Broadway this year, scene changes were announced with 1950s newsreel footage. Lately, it seems, going to the theater is a lot like going to the movies. There’s often a screen upstage, and either film footage, photo stills or a combination of the two — collectively known as projections — are part of the show. So much so that the Yale School of Drama is going to offer a full- fledged projection design program starting this fall. Now you can major in it. Wendall Harrington, the veteran designer who heads the new program at Yale, isn’t surprised that projections have become so popular; their use is “expanding exponentially,” as the drama school’s offi- cial announcement noted. “Everybody writing and creating theater now has grown up watching TV,” Ms. Harrington said. “So cinema is their language. Motion is their language. Of course we’re going to try to express ourselves that way.” In addition to scenic, sound and lighting design, students in the new discipline will study projection engineering, image-cre- ation software and motion graphics, all the better to be well-rounded theater professionals. Check the credits in your Playbills, and you’ll find the title projection designer turning up in all kinds of productions. Michael Mayer, who is directing “Ameri- can Idiot,” the Green Day musical set to open on Broadway next month, said, “It would be foolish of me and my designers not to embrace video and projection in a really giant way.” “American Idiot” is set in 2003, so theatergoers may see, among SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES other things, images of President George and Theater Group), a troupe that special- audience. There, screened on his white W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner izes in the experimental, recalls the Dark T-shirt, was a clip from the Zapruder film and of Britney Spears doing something Ages. “Back then we were using video- of the John F. Kennedy assassination. Joe scandalous. tapes,” he said. “We had VHS decks and Mantello, the director, told Ms. McCarthy The projections reflect “a whole genera- this old clunky switcher matrix.” It was that he knew from the beginning that he tion’s response to the media, specifically 1996. wanted to use that clip. television,” Mr. Mayer said. “We have a Today Mr. Cunningham and his team A few theater people have noted that culture right now that has us buried in our have inexpensive technology like Isadora, projection design is being incorporated BlackBerrys and our iPhones and all of our involving “24 video projectors, all coordi- earlier in the process. “Sometimes they Palm things. Everywhere you look, there’s nated,” which they used for “Fire Island,” a are writing it into their scripts, which I a screen now.” 2008 beach drama at their Greenwich think is a really big mistake,” said Ms. Har- At Studio 54 the creative team of the mu- Street studio, and Eyeliner, a high-defini- rington of Yale, because directors don’t sical tribute “Sondheim on Sondheim” was tion video projection system employed for at work on a production that will be dom- particularly want to be told how to stage a 2007 production, “Losing Something.” the play. inated by images on screen. Some 50 tele- David Gallo, who with Shawn Sagady visions dangled above or lay on a series of It’s also one of the most flexible aspects created the projection design for the cur- of a show. While a set can take months to steps in general disarray, part of what will rent Broadway musical “Memphis,” is ex- become the movable, multipiece set for the design and build, a projection or video im- show, which begins previews this month. age can be added, deleted or substituted in “The set and the video together have to For a TV generation, the blink of an eye. kind of be Steve onstage,” said Beowulf If there’s one thing that seems to annoy Boritt, the set designer, who describes the blurred lines at live shows, LIBRADO ROMERO/THE NEW YORK TIMES A-list projection and video professionals, show as “a documentary in musical revue it’s seeing the projection used as just sce- function is to serve the play. Always.” form” and considers Stephen Sondheim a as projection becomes a Projections play a role nery, although that’s how Ms. Harrington virtual character in it. drama school item. in “The Orphans’ That can be a challenge because audi- got her start. He and Peter Flaherty, the projection de- Home Cycle,” top, and ences’ eyes tend to linger on screens. She recalled working on “They’re Play- “The competition between live actors signer, were discussing the show, whose in “Sondheim on ing Our Song,” the intimate 1979 musical cited about new software called Pandora’s onstage and the moving image — honestly, starring Robert Klein and Lucie Arnaz that stars include Barbara Cook, Vanessa Wil- Box, which links the computers that sep- Sondheim,” for which liams and Tom Wopat, and the importance personally, it’s one of my largest concerns had 26 scenes. “There’s a scene in the arately run the projections and the moving of the nonhuman players. “The liveness of Beowulf Boritt, left, is with any design I create,” said Elaine J. laundromat, and the next scene is on the scenery. theater is still the reason that theater is set designer and Peter McCarthy, who was responsible for the surface of the Moon,” she said. And there theater,” Mr. Flaherty said, but, as he ac- But “Memphis,” the rock-’n’-roll-and- Flaherty projection projections for the Broadway shows was definitely no budget for multiple sets, soul story of a mid-20th-century romance knowledged later, “video has an immense designer. “Spamalot” (inspiring visuals of the Grail, so they created the laundromat and every- power.” between a white man and a black woman animation she calls “friendly rip-offs of thing else with projection. Technology itself is a huge factor in pro- in Tennessee, is a fairly intimate musical, Terry Gilliam’s work”), “Wicked” (a Today, Ms. Harrington said, “what you jection design’s growth. Some projection so the decision was made to keep projec- witch’s terrifying shadow, flying monkeys) have to figure out is what is the soul of the tions subtle. Theatergoers will see scene- and “Assassins.” has been seen in theater for decades — ONLINE: STAGE MOVES piece.” But she fears that attitude is being since “the beginning of electricity,” if not enhancing still images like radio dials and But sometimes the director wants you to overshadowed by the availability of new, longer, Ms. Harrington suggested — but microphones, and a blowup of the action More images of video look at the projection and nothing else. In glitzy technology, she said. just a few years ago became a lot cheaper onstage when the plot moves to a TV projections mentioned that 2004 revival of “Assassins,” for in- “I only hope it will get over a little bit the and easier to use. dance show. in this article: stance, Lee Harvey Oswald (Neil Patrick ‘shiny toy’ part,” she said of the projection- Kevin Cunningham, the artistic director “We had to deliberately hold ourselves nytimes.com/theater Harris) was upstage center when he took design world. “I’m like waiting for this mo- of Three-Legged Dog (a k a 3LD Media back,” Mr. Gallo said, adding later, “Your his rifle, shot and then turned to face the ment to pass.” With Turturro, Italy Knows No Bounds

had met at Yale Drama School, and the From Page 6 book was her first gift to him. The inscrip- mental comedy “Questi Fantasmi.” In 2005 tion: “For John. To adapt or just to read. Mr. Turturro brought the play — retitled Kathie.” “Souls of Naples” and directed by Roman In 2007 Mr. Turturro, trolling for a play Paska — to New York and Naples. He has to mount in Naples, was encouraged by since written a screenplay and is on track Ms. Borowitz to rework the classic tales. to direct and act in an English-language They collaborated on the script with Mr. feature, which is being produced by Do- Casella and Carl Capotorto, the author of menico Procacci, who also produced “Go- the recent memoir “Twisted Head.” (Mr. morrah.” Turturro later learned that in the early Mr. Turturro is in the midst of editing 1980s, Mr. Calvino and fellow fabulist Fede- “Passione,” a documentary on Neapolitan rico Fellini had talked about distilling the song that’s reminiscent of “Buena Vista Social Club.” He calls the movie an endless An actor unleashes his jukebox of past and present-day musi- cians. love for his parents’ Last September another documentary he appears in and helped produce, “Re- homeland, especially its Aida Turturro and hearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy,” had its pre- miere at the Venice Film Festival. “Re- folklore, onstage. John Turturro, who hearsal,” also directed by Mr. Paska, is a adapted “Fiabe Pirandello-esque film within a film that ex- fables into a film about prophetic dreams. Italiane” from various amines the island’s rich history of pup- Alas, Mr. Calvino died in 1985 and the fables. “I find the petry, ponders the Sicilian preoccupation project never got off the ground.) To stage “Italian Folk Tales,” Mr. Tur- economy and beauty with death and follows Mr. Turturro to the of these stories quite home of his maternal grandmother in Ara- turro enlisted the aid of the Teatro Stabile gona. At the convent across the street he di Torino and obtained the permission of irresistible,” he said. launches into an impromptu duet with a Mr. Calvino’s widow, Chiquita. As it turned nun, who like his father, who died in 1988, out, Ms. Calvino, a genial and youthful oc- is from the Apulia region of southeastern togenarian, had loved his comic turn as a Italy. pedophile bowler in “The Big Lebowski.” He remembers his parents, Katherine Casting was a family affair: among the and Nicholas, as splendid raconteurs with American actors in the troupe, Ms. Boro- a fund of stories that seemed bottomless witz, the couple’s 9-year-old son Diego and and memories that seemed infinite. “My Mr. Turturro’s cousin Aida Turturro all mother was dry and precise and could hold juggled multiple roles. your attention for hours with details that One of Mr. Turturro’s biggest technical were sometimes shocking, sometimes fun- questions involved the magical donkey. ny,” he said. “My father liked to exagger- Dare he trust a mechanical one? Fortu- ate and embellish and push an anecdote to nately a crew member from Sicily who had its limits. He never told jokes. He didn’t grown up with mules volunteered to wear like jokes. I don’t, either. I prefer revealing a donkey suit. And rather than raining ac- stories that make me laugh.” tual jewels on the set, Mr. Turturro opted “Italian Folk Tales” has amused him for a beam of green flickering light. “It’s since 1981, when he was given a copy by cool,” told young Diego. “But you have to his future wife, Katherine Borowitz. They use your imagination.” GIANNI FIORITO