Free Festival to Offer Plays With New York Themes - NYTimes.com

MARCH 11, 2013, 2:13 PM Free Festival to Offer Plays With New York Themes

By PATRICK HEALY Plays with New York themes written by John Patrick Shanley, Amiri Baraka, Edward Albee, Lorraine Hansberry and more than a dozen others will be featured in a free festival of readings and panel discussions led by members of the Labyrinth Theater Company starting next Monday and running through March 24, the organization has announced.

The NewYorkNewYork Festival, which will be held at the Bank Street Theater in the West Village, is scheduled to begin with a reading of Israel Horovitz’s 1968 play “The Indian Wants the Bronx” followed by a talk moderated by Mr. Horovitz about the rise of Off Broadway theater in the late 1960s. Subsequent nights will showcase readings of ’s “In Arabia, We’d All Be Kings,” Mr. Shanley’s “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” and Mr. Baraka’s “Dutchman”; each writer will lead a post- show discussion as well.

Then, beginning at 7 p.m. on March 22, a 48-hour marathon of around-the-clock readings will start. Labyrinth company members, guest artists and members of the audience will be cast in each play, which will also include works by James Baldwin, María Irene Fornés, John Guare, Jack Kerouac, Kenneth Lonergan and Eugene O’Neill. Tickets will be available on a first-come-first-served basis before each reading.

Founded in 1992, Labyrinth emerged as an Off Broadway force in the 2000s in large part because of acclaimed plays by Mr. Guirgis (“Our Lady of 121st Street”) and the leadership of its co-artistic directors at the time, and John Ortiz. More recently Labyrinth productions have been on a smaller scale and received mixed reviews; the company is now looking for new leaders to replace its current artistic directors: Mr. Guirgis, the costume designer Mimi O’Donnell and the actor Yul Vázquez.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/11/free-festival-to-offer-plays-with-new-york-themes/?pagewanted=print[3/12/2013 10:46:28 AM] Self-Absorbed, With Chekhov as a Backdrop - The New York Times

March 11, 2013 THEATER REVIEW Self-Absorbed, With Chekhov as a Backdrop

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

I am beginning to think that all an aspiring (or established) dramatist needs to do to draw notice is to billboard some connection to Chekhov in his or her work, so august has the Russian author’s name become. “Neva,” a new play written and directed by the Chilean writer Guillermo Calderón that is having its English- language premiere at the Public Theater, is a turgid and repetitive meditation on love, theater and politics, but it has already been widely seen on international stages, possibly because Olga Knipper, Chekhov’s widow, has a central role.

As Mr. Calderón’s drama-free psychodrama grinds along, you may come to feel as if you were stuck in a confined space with three members of a species well known for sucking up all the air in the room: the self- involved actor. In a sense you are: the play takes place in 1905 in a rehearsal room of a St. Petersburg theater, where three actors have gathered to prepare for a production of “The Cherry Orchard.” (The play takes its title from the river that runs through the city.) That one of them happens to be Olga Knipper does not make the atmosphere any less stifling.

I hasten to add that the three actors playing actors are terrifically good. Bianca Amato is captivating from the opening moments as Olga, speaking with anxiety at the thought that her artistry is evaporating. Her approaching performance in “The Cherry Orchard” has her gripped with fearful fantasies about the praise she will crave (“Like a wet puppy I will ask them, ‘Did you like it?’ ”) and the backbiting commentary she won’t hear (“We only came to see her because she is the widow of the genius,” she imagines her detractors saying). Ms. Amato manages to make Olga’s self-dramatizing histrionics absurdly funny, but also tinged with real pathos.

She is joined by the reliably excellent Quincy Tyler Bernstine, as an actress named Masha who is thrilled to be in the presence of the great Chekhov’s widow — until she isn’t. Making his Off Broadway debut, the magnetic Luke Robertson plays Aleko, well born but occasionally given to spouting Tolstoyan opinions about the beauty of the simple life.

Olga is still mourning the loss of her husband, who died six months earlier. Perhaps to help salve the wound, she requests that Aleka and Masha join her in re-enacting scenes from their life together, in particular Chekhov’s grim death at a spa in Germany. With Aleko on hand to play the dying man, Olga relives the piteous last moments: her desperate attempt to ease his pain by putting an ice pack on his heart (“You don’t put ice on an empty heart,” Chekhov is said to have said); his sober assessment, in German, of his situation, “Ich sterbe” (“I’m dying”); and his oddly detached observation, upon being given a glass of Champagne, that he hasn’t had one in quite a while. These details are all part of the record, but why Mr. Calderón serves them up as melodramatic burlesque is beyond me.

When they are not feverishly emoting through these scenes from the life, the actors in “Neva” (translated by

http://theater.nytimes.com/...ews/neva-by-guillermo-calderon-at-the-public-theater.html?pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print[3/12/2013 10:45:45 AM] Self-Absorbed, With Chekhov as a Backdrop - The New York Times

Andrea Thome) are performing bits and pieces of Chekhov’s plays, bickering about their talents or sharing talk of various love affairs: a liaison between Masha and Aleko (he was hoping to improve her acting talents), the adulterous relationship between the theater’s director and the ticket seller. These elements make for a murky stew, with the jerky wandering of the conversation often occasioning startled laughter. (One of the funnier moments: Aleko’s panting confession that he adores Olga, which is suddenly exposed by the self-satisfied Aleko as just another performance.)

There are scattered references to the winds of revolution beginning to sweep through the streets of St. Petersburg, but the political ferment taking place outside the rehearsal room is referred to only tangentially until the final, interminable monologue from Masha. Suddenly shedding her respectful attitude toward Olga, Masha goes off on a long, vituperative tear about the new day dawning, which will wipe away the detritus of a decadent culture, like the theater.

“How many times can one say I love you and I love you not? I’m tired of it,” she seethes. “How many times can you cry and claim truth onstage? And be more real and find new symbols? Enough. It’s already 1905, and I believe that theater is finished. This is not the 19th-century anymore, capitalism has machines now. You disgust me. I could start by burning this theater, I would like to see it burn and with it the arrogance, the vanity.”

This fiery rhetoric comes more or less out of nowhere, given that Masha has been joining in the self-indulgent talk of craft and emotion with a gusto equal to that of her colleagues. (Another of Masha’s lines more cogently sums up the navel-gazing atmosphere that suffuses the play: “I want to talk about myself.”)

The defining question driving “Neva,” Mr. Calderon has said, is this: “What’s the point of seeing a theatrical work when, because of politics, people are dying every day?” This strikes me as a dumbfounding question for an artist to be asking, particularly in the context of a play capitalizing on the renown of a writer who remained steadfastly apolitical throughout his life.

During Chekhov’s lifetime many people died because of politics. Before he became a dramatist of renown, Chekhov made a long visit to the prison island Sakhalin, where inmates suffered terrible deprivation and even death. His bearing witness to the cruelty and abuse they endured did not stop him from believing instinctively in the necessity of art as a civilizing influence worthy of his devoted attention. The depiction of actors as narcissistic windbags in “Neva” would seems to suggest that Mr. Calderón doesn’t share this opinion.

Neva

Written and directed by Guillermo Calderón; translated by Andrea Thome; costumes by Susan Hilferty; music by Tomás González; fight director, Thomas Schall; production stage manager, Buzz Cohen; associate artistic director, Mandy Hackett; associate producer, Maria Goyanes; general manager, Steven Showalter; production executive, Ruth E. Sternberg. Presented by the Public Theater, Oskar Eustis, artistic director; Patrick Willingham, executive director. At the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village; (212) 967-7555, publictheater.org. Through March 31. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.

WITH: Bianca Amato (Olga Knipper), Quincy Tyler Bernstine (Masha) and Luke Robertson (Aleko).

http://theater.nytimes.com/...ews/neva-by-guillermo-calderon-at-the-public-theater.html?pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print[3/12/2013 10:45:45 AM] Sybil Christopher, Actress and Founder, Dies at 83 - NYTimes.com

March 11, 2013 Sybil Christopher, a Theater Producer, Dies at 83 By PAUL VITELLO Sybil Christopher, a former actress, famous ex-wife and founder of Arthur, one of ’s most popular celebrity in the 1960s, died on Thursday in Manhattan. She was 83.

Her death was confirmed by a spokesman for the theater she helped found in Sag Harbor on Long Island, the Bay Street Theater, a showcase for writers and artists who summer there.

Ms. Christopher, the first wife of the actor — both were Welsh-born — first became widely known in the United States in 1963 as the injured party in the first of Mr. Burton’s several divorces. He left her to marry after months of intense gossip about their affair, which at the time was considered a shocking scandal. Ms. Christopher (Ms. Burton at the time) and Mr. Burton had been living in Southern California.

Ms. Christopher apparently inherited most of the friends from their marriage, at least those in New York, where she moved soon after the divorce to settle with her two young daughters in an apartment on Central Park West. When she decided to open a discotheque in 1965 on the site of the old El Morocco, at 154 East 54th Street, she raised money from hundreds of people, most of them New York friends, including Roddy McDowall, , and .

They called it Arthur, she said, in honor of a George Harrison quip in the Beatles’ 1964 film, “A Hard Day’s Night.” After someone asked him the name of his hairstyle, he replied, “Arthur.”

The club became a celebrity hangout, attracting artists like Rudolph Nureyev, and as well as aristocrats like Princess Margaret of Britain. Ms. Christopher, once famous mainly for having lost her husband to another woman, had been transformed into a kind of accidental avatar of new womanhood.

Ms. Christopher was “the heroine of the stickiest mess in the history of sticky messes,” Nora Ephron, then a feature writer for The New York Post, wrote in 1966. She had come through the ordeal with her dignity intact, her circle of friends enlarged and a social presence in Manhattan that made her “the bellwether of a good party,” Ms. Ephron added,

“After the divorce,” she wrote, “it became clear that Sybil Burton was going to cut a fine swath for herself in New York City.”

In 1966 she married Jordan Christopher, the lead singer of Arthur’s house band, the Wild Ones.

Sybil Williams was born in Tylorstown, South , on March 27, 1929. Her mother died when she was 10, and her father, a coal miner, when she was 15. Living near London with an older sister, she became interested in the theater and attended the London Academy of Dramatic Arts. She met Mr. Burton while they were making a British film, “The Last Days of Dolwyn” (1949) — her first and last movie.

She essentially stopped acting after she and Mr. Burton were married in 1949, performing only on rare occasions, as she did in 1954 when she helped record the celebrated BBC radio production of Dylan Thomas’s “Under Milk Wood.” She and Mr. Burton had two children, the actress and Jessica Burton, both of whom survive her, as does a daughter, Amy Christopher, from Ms. Christopher’s second marriage. Mr. Burton died in 1984, Mr. Christopher in 1996.

After Arthur closed in 1969, Ms. Christopher helped found the New Theater on 54th Street, which produced shows

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like “The Knack,” directed by Mike Nichols, “Scuba Duba,” starring Jerry Orbach, and the revue “The Mad Show.”

Ms. Christopher founded the Bay Street Theater in 1991 with two partners, Emma Walton and Stephen Hamilton, setting up in an old warehouse near Sag Harbor’s town pier. She was its artistic director for 22 years and lived in Sag Harbor until her health began to fail, returning to Manhattan last December.

The company initially drew from the work of playwrights who lived locally, including Joe Pintauro, Terrence McNally and Lanford Wilson. Its productions featured well-known actors like Ben Gazzara, Polly Draper, Hal Linden, Tony Roberts, Alan Alda and Eli Wallach.

“She was a woman who reinvented herself again and again, from the time she was a young girl until the end of her life,” said Murphy Davis, a longtime friend and former co-director of the Bay Street Theater. “She was a phoenix.”

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March 12, 2013

Edinburgh Festival Sets Stage Slate New York stalwarts including Wooster Group join the International Festival's 2013 lineup.

By Mark Fisher

EDINBURGH — New York legit creatives will feature prominently in the Edinburgh Intl. Festival this August. with a three-week program that will include the Wooster Group, Meredith Monk, the Philip Glass Ensemble, Patti Smith and the Brooklyn-based musicians of Bang on a Can All-Stars.

There’ll also be a visit by the L.A. Dance Project led by choreographer Benjamin Millepied, and a look back at the video art of the late Nam June Paik who settled in Gotham in the mid-1960s.

The theme of art and technology links much of the work. EIF helmer Jonathan Mills, whose 2012 program took £2.83 million ($4.33 million) at the box office, said the fest this year focuses on the ways artists have been influenced by innovations ranging from the harpsichord to the television. The theme encompasses an exhibition of medical drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and a staging of “Fidelio” directed by Seattle video artist Gary Hill, who sets the Beethoven opera on a space ship.

In the theater program, the Wooster Group is bringing Elizabeth LeCompte’s production of “Hamlet” starring Scott Shepherd and seen at the Public Theater in 2007. From Dublin, the Gate Theater and Pan Pan Theater are staging four plays that Samuel Beckett wrote for television or radio. Alongside “All That Fall,” “Eh Joe,” “Embers” and “First Love,” there’s also Barry McGovern in “I’ll Go On,” drawn from three Beckett novels and seen at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in Lincoln Center in 1988.

Other productions on the lineup include the preem of “Leaving Planet Earth”, a site-specific sci-fi tale by Scotland’s Grid Iron; a one-man “Metamorphosis” by Taiwan’s Contemporary Legend Theater; “Histoire d’amour,” a film-theater crossover by Chile’s Teatro Cinema; Monk’s 2012 environmental music-theater piece “On Behalf of Nature”; and a production of “The Tragedy of Coriolanus” by Beijing People’s Art Theater, featuring two heavy metal bands.

The contemporary music strand includes “The Poet Speaks,” in which Patti Smith and Philip Glass pay homage to Allen Ginsberg; “La Belle et la Bete” in which the Philip Glass Ensemble accompanies Jean Cocteau’s 1946 movie; and a concert by Cologne’s Musicfabrik celebrating the music of Frank Zappa.

The Edinburgh Intl. Festival runs Aug. 9-Sept. 1.

Daily Variety

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