The Morning Line

THE MORNING LINE DATE: Friday, March 4, 2016 FROM: Michelle Farabaugh Danielle Gruskiewicz, Claire Manning, Amanda Price PAGES: 18, including this page C2 March 4, 2016 C10 March 4, 2016 Review: ‘Rimbaud in New York’ Splices the Genes of the Original Outlaw Artist By Ben Brantley It is the consensus of the seriously cool that nobody was ever cooler than Arthur Rimbaud. More than a century after his death, this French poet still blazes as the unwashed apotheosis of the outlaw artist, a beautiful, sexually fluid renegade genius who, as one of his early biographers put it, “lived in three years the literary evolution of modern times.” At the end of those three years, he was only 20. But by then he had conducted and ended a fabled love affair with the older Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine and written the entire body of visionary verse that would anticipate future iconoclasts in art movements from Surrealism to punk rock. No, he didn’t die young (he lived on to a disease-riddled 37), as is traditionally expected of this particular breed of cult idol. Instead, he one-upped the usual gorgeous corpses by walking out on his glory with a sneer and refusing to look back. In other words, Rimbaud was the opposite of nostalgic, which means he probably wouldn’t care much for “Rimbaud in New York,” which runs through Sunday at BAM Fisher. This earnest collage tribute piece from the Civilians, written and directed by Steve Cosson, celebrates Rimbaud as the man who invented downtown as a state of mind. That’s the sphere where flaming creative creatures from the margins dreamed into being their own colony of otherness, of a rough and ravishing world on the fringes. Legend has it that the overcrowded, overpriced island called Manhattan once harbored such a world. And it is to that remote civilization that “Rimbaud in New York” looks with a wonder that is only occasionally tempered by skepticism. As is the wont of the Civilians, who practice “investigative theater,” this production channels the voices of assorted experts, artists and academics on the subject under consideration. They include writers and musicians who knew (or know of) downtown New York from the 1950s through the ’70s, when it was inhabited by the likes of Frank O’Hara, Andy Warhol, Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine and the artist David Wojnarowicz. The speakers themselves are incarnated by an eight-member ensemble, who used various wigs and props to become the show’s assorted pundits and witnesses. Just who the performers are impersonating is revealed, in haste, only at the show’s end. And you can be forgiven for feeling like an unexpected and uninitiated guest at a gathering of a Rimbaud fan club, whose members self-consciously put on different funny costumes and voices while discussing the object of their fascination. Sometimes they debate the meaning and legacy of Rimbaud; at other times — and these are, relatively speaking, the best of times — they recite from “Illuminations,” as translated by the eminent American poet John Ashbery(who is also a character here), or perform musical numbers in homage to that work, written by seven composers. The prose poems of “Illuminations” defy literal interpretation, and it’s best to sit back and let the hallucinogenic images swirl over and around you. Rimbaud, as is often noted here, created his own sui generis landscape, and you can enter it only if you accept it on his terms. Whether incanting or singing, most of the cast members here only rarely suggest that they have fully stepped into that world. As a teenager, I saw Ms. Smith, an avowed Rimbaud acolyte, reciting poetry in a claustrophobic New York club and had a visceral impression that she was inhabiting a wild and distant planet. I couldn’t see what she saw, but through seeing how she saw — with that alarmed, glazed, jubilant gaze — I felt I could sense the exotic wonder of wherever her mind had gone roaming. Such moments seldom arrive in “Rimbaud in New York,” which has been developed with support from the Poetry Foundation, though there are flickers of Smithian rapture in the poems performed by Jo Lampert and Rebecca Hart. The show is most engaging in musical numbers that summon the impact of Rimbaud on others, which often feature lively, stylized choreography by Sam Pinkleton that suggests how the Ramones might have danced if Bob Fosse had choreographed them. Among these are the rowdy opener, “Hot Mess Disaster Boy” (with music by Adam Cochran); “The Future of Poetry Is Female” (based on an interview with the poet Ariana Reines), written and performed by Ms. Hart; and Joseph Keckler’s “City,” inspired by Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud-mask photographs, sung in a larynx-defying range of octaves by Mr. Keckler. The show stumbles badly when the performers and the design team — which includes Andromache Chalfant (set), Paloma Young (costumes) and Eric Southern (lighting) — seek to recreate the sensory orgy of reading “Illuminations.” Pretzel-twisted balloons and cascading yellow balls, after all, don’t quite match a poète maudit’s “dreamed-of release, the shattering of grace crossed with new violence.” C2 March 4, 2016 Review: In ‘Red Speedo,’ a Swimmer Faces a Moral Quandary By Charles Isherwood A bright slip of a swimsuit seems a small garment on which to hang a knotty morality play, but the ingenious Lucas Hnath engineers this remarkable feat with “Red Speedo,” a taut, incisive drama at New York Theater Workshop about a swimmer with high Olympic hopes and a waterlogged ethical compass. Ray, played by the terrific Alex Breaux, has spent his life in the water, essentially, and is preparing for the upcoming Olympic trials as the play begins. (The sleek set, by Riccardo Hernandez, is a gym with an actual pool, a slice of which fronts the stage.) But a scandal at the swim club where he trains has the potential to derail his dream. A cooler stocked with performance-enhancing drugs was found in the club refrigerator. Ray has told his coach (Peter Jay Fernandez) that he heard the drugs belonged to a fellow swimmer, but in the tense opening scene, Ray’s brother Peter (Lucas Caleb Rooney), a lawyer who is also his de facto manager, vociferously argues that even a whiff of controversy about doping could damage his brother’s reputation — and potentially ruin the coach’s future, too. He makes the case that the coach serves everyone’s best interests by tossing the drugs in the toilet and hushing the whole episode up. When the coach, whose honorable nature Mr. Fernandez makes nicely transparent, insists that it’s his moral obligation to report the incident to the sport’s authorities, Peter only doubles down on his suasion, implying he will move Ray to another club if the coach doesn’t fall in line. There’s more than a potential Olympic medal at stake, of course; with fame comes a financial windfall, and Peter has already been in talks with the Speedo people about endorsement money. Mr. Hnath, whose previous plays include “The Christians” and “A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney,” has a wonderfully inventive theatrical mind. He rewrites the rules of dramaturgy with each play, usually tossing out the naturalistic playbook — and for that matter the playbook he created the last time around. With fragmented dialogue that often comes at you like artillery fire, “Red Speedo” recalls the (good) work of David Mamet, distilled and compressed. (A little more looseness in the direction, by Lileana Blain-Cruz, might make the play’s first scene feel less like fake-Mamet.) In its depiction of ruthless men who will stop at nothing to serve their own ends, one might also discern a nod to Mr. Mamet. But Mr. Hnath’s voice and style are fundamentally his own. There’s an elemental, stylized simplicity to his work that focuses attention on the meanings behind the matters at hand. The characters in “Red Speedo” are palpably, at times movingly, human in their complexity and weakness (“We all do things that are sorta good and sorta not so good,” as Ray puts it), but as the play gathers steam it broadens out to become a subtle indictment of the ethos that insists that winning is everything. As Peter says, “When you go for what you want, when you think about yourself, when you do what’s best for you, everyone benefits.” Could Ayn Rand have put it any better? (Or, say, a current presidential candidate?) Certainly Peter, portrayed with forceful intensity by Mr. Rooney, is not merely looking out for his younger brother from filial affection. He’s disenchanted with his legal firm, and hopes that with Ray’s success he can smoothly move into the lucrative business of “athlete management.” But Ray, who tends to speak in a dopey-sounding monotone — Peter readily admits, in Ray’s presence, that he’s “no scholar” — soon makes a startling revelation that threatens all his brother’s assumptions about the bright future: The drugs in that cooler were actually his, and he doesn’t think that he can perform as well without them. “I definitely need the stuff,” he says when Peter tries to suggest that it’s really his natural talent that has gotten him this far. “I mean, this is like whatdoyoucallit — science.” Ray was on the verge of being dropped by his coach when a sports therapist, Lydia (a sharp Zoë Winters), who was also his girlfriend, suggested that the problem was just a matter of testosterone levels, and that only by artificially boosting those levels would he be able to improve his times.

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