The Morning Line
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THE MORNING LINE DATE: Tuesday, April 1, 2014 FROM: Emily Meagher, Michelle Farabaugh PAGES: 13, including this page April 1, 2014 Grandeur Under Siege ‘Red Velvet’ Recalls One Shocked London Audience By Ben Brantley Shock waves rarely travel across centuries. But at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, where Lolita Chakrabarti’s “Red Velvet” opened on Monday night, you can experience firsthand what it must have felt like to be part of one seriously rattled London theater audience in 1833. This uncanny adventure in time exploration comes courtesy of Adrian Lester, the magnificent star of “Red Velvet,” which debuted to wide acclaim in 2012 at the Tricycle Theater in London. Since the 1990s, Mr. Lester has created a rich and varied gallery of Shakespeare characters, ranging from Rosalind in “As You Like It” to the title heroes of “Henry V” and “Hamlet.” Just last summer, I saw him in top form as Othello at the National Theater, which you might think would have prepared me for the first-act curtain scene of “Red Velvet,” in which he takes on the Moor of Venice again. But the layers — of style, technique and emotion — that Mr. Lester brings to this particular scene are so intricate and so many that you’ll have trouble wrapping your mind around them. For here Mr. Lester, a British actor of Caribbean descent, is portraying Ira Aldridge, an African-American actor of the early 19th century, playing a great tragic role that had hitherto been essayed on the English stage only by white men, usually in blackface. As Mr. Lester’s Aldridge, illuminated by footlights, takes us through the fabled handkerchief scene of “Othello,” it stirs up an excitement that frightens. You understand very well why such acting would have jolted theatergoers and critics, poised on the cusp of the Victorian era, right out of their hidebound minds. By this point, “Red Velvet” — directed by Indhu Rubasingham and designed by Tom Piper with a rich love for theater as a fleeting pipe dream — has provided us with a very thorough social and historical context for what we are witnessing. Possibly too thorough. As a portrait of Aldridge (1807-67), an artist for whom “pioneer” seems too tame an adjective, “Red Velvet” sometimes brings to mind the stolidity of great-lives biographies, which conscientiously balance period detail with contemporary insights. But such books rarely deliver the you-are-there payoff that arrives whenever Mr. Lester is allowed to commandeer the stage. From the moment he makes his first entrance, as an elderly Aldridge on an Eastern European tour of “King Lear,” this actor exudes the scary, outsize presence of the barnstorming stardom of another time. That opening scene uses a device familiar in biodramas: Our careworn hero, near the end of his life, is confronted by an annoying reporter who wants to uncover the man behind the legend. The journalist in this case is a young Polish woman (played by Rachel Finnegan), whose ambition and awkward English lead her to pose less than tactful questions. For example, why hasn’t Aldridge returned to Covent Garden since his “Othello” of three decades earlier? Total Daily Circulation–1,586,757 Sunday Circulation– 2,003,247 This is talk to make a wintry lion roar. “It is reputation that endures,” Aldridge declaims at full volume. “Geography is irrelevant.” Mr. Lester packs into those sentences a lifetime of grandeur under siege. We then flash back to 1833, to the Theater Royal in Covent Garden, where the resident star, the venerable Edmund Kean, has fallen ill onstage during a performance of “Othello.” Pierre Laporte (a spirited Eugene O’Hare), the company manager, has brought in a pinch-hitter from the provinces, who is ready to go on that very night. That the actor is Aldridge means that this “Othello” will be unprecedented. A black actor has never played a starring dramatic role, not even Othello, on a London stage before, and the existing cast — especially Kean’s son, Charles (Oliver Ryan), who has been portraying Iago — is uneasy. Their fears, alas, are justified. The reviews will be merciless, Laporte will be forced to close the show, and Aldridge will have to look outside England to establish his reputation. This is all according to historical record. From the facts, Ms. Chakrabarti (who is married to Mr. Lester) has imagined a debate within Laporte’s theater about what acting was, is and could be. In this version, Aldridge becomes the brave new incarnation of a forceful, natural style in a theater governed by artifice. “Truth alters rhythm and gesture, don’t you think?” Aldridge asks of his Desdemona, Ellen Tree (Charlotte Lucas). She responds, falteringly, “How — avant-garde!” It seems unlikely that Ellen Tree (a celebrated actress of her day) would have used that description. There’s often the sense in “Red Velvet” that the arguments so explicitly laid out by its characters have been translated into a self-consciously latter-day language. Much of what the actors say to one another wouldn’t sound out of place in a Strasberg studio workshop. Characters are also given to announcing their opposing points of view baldly: “Theater is a political act,” on the one hand, versus “It is not our responsibility to build our theater to reflect our people,” on the other. What makes “Red Velvet” worth seeing is its way of turning these artistic abstractions into flesh. We are first allowed to sample the highly mannered acting of the Kean company members. (Mr. Ryan’s penny- dreadful Iago is priceless.) Then we see Aldridge’s version. To this production’s credit, the Aldridge approach to acting remains based on stilted poses. But you’re also aware of a searing intensity that burns through the baroque surface and to which Ms. Lucas’s Tree responds with awakening warmth. You are also conscious of the sources of the heat that Aldridge gives off in performance. It is compounded of the ego that is an expected part of blazing genius, but also of the anger and frustration of a supremely gifted man who, like Othello, has been repeatedly thwarted because his skin is the color it is. We see those qualities more nakedly in the ferocious scene in which Laporte tells Aldridge that he is closing the show, and in the elderly Aldridge of the play’s final scene. By then, it’s clear that an infernal, holy fire — of resentment, of resistance and of an extraordinary, hotly defended talent — is both what’s killing Aldridge and what has kept him alive. NY Times Total Daily Circulation–876,638 Monthly Online Circulation–19,500,000 Red Velvet By Lolita Chakrabarti; directed by Indhu Rubasingham; designed by Tom Piper; lighting by Oliver Fenwick; sound by Paul Arditti; music by Paul Englishby; choreography by Imogen Knight; production manager, Shaz McGee; dialect coach, Richard Ryder; fight director, Ruth Cooper-Brown of Rc Annie. A Tricycle Theater production, Ms. Rubasingham, artistic director; Bridget Kalloushi, executive producer; Kate Devey, executive director; presented by St. Ann’s Warehouse, Susan Feldman, artistic director; Andrew D. Hamingson, executive director. At St. Ann’s Warehouse, 29 Jay Street, at Plymouth Street, Dumbo, Brooklyn, 718-254-8779, stannswarehouse.org. Through April 20. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. WITH: Simon Chandler (Bernard Warde/Terence), Rachel Finnegan (Halina/Betty Lovell/Margaret Aldridge), Natasha Gordon (Connie), Nic Jackman (Henry Forrester/Casimir), Adrian Lester (Ira Aldridge), Charlotte Lucas (Ellen Tree), Eugene O’Hare (Pierre Laporte) and Oliver Ryan (Charles Kean). NY Times Total Daily Circulation–876,638 Monthly Online Circulation–19,500,000 April 1, 2014 Lorenzo Semple Jr., Creator of TV’s ‘Batman,’ Dies at 91 By Bruce Weber Lorenzo Semple Jr., a playwright and screenwriter who would probably be best known for his scripts for films like “Papillon” and “Pretty Poison” if he hadn’t put the Zap! and the Pow! in the original episodes of the arch, goofy 1960s television show “Batman,” died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 91. His daughter Maria Semple confirmed the death. Mr. Semple had written a couple of Broadway plays and episodes for a number of television series when he and the producer William Dozier were asked by ABC executives to adapt the Batman comic book into a television series. This was 1965. Mr. Semple was living with his family in Spain, and though it seemed as if the network had a drama in mind, he immediately saw the absurdity in the character of a wealthy bachelor who enjoyed dressing up as a bat to fight crime. “The TV show concept virtually exploded in my sangria-enhanced brain, full-blown,” Mr. Semple wrote in Variety in 2008. The idea was high camp. Batman, played by Adam West, and his ward and fellow crime fighter, Robin (Burt Ward), were preposterously brave and goody-goody, unenhanced by superpowers but aided by the advanced technology — the Batmobile! — that only someone as privileged as Bruce Wayne (the man behind the Batman mask) could afford. The villains, threats to civilization in Batman’s Gotham City, were cartoonish, many of them repeat offenders played by recognizable stars: Cesar Romero as the Joker, Frank Gorshin as the Riddler, Burgess Meredith as the Penguin and Julie Newmar as Catwoman, among others. The dialogue was playfully jokey. But perhaps most emblematic, the show’s frequent fistfights were accompanied by graphics — expressive exclamations printed on the screen in comic-book style: Krunch! Kapow! Zowie! The show had its premiere on Jan. 12, 1966, and was an instant hit, though not a long-lasting one. It ran for two years, twice a week — with the first episode ending in a cliffhanger — 120 episodes in all.