April 2000 Brooklyn Academy of Music 2000 Spring Season BAMcinematek Brooklyn Philharmonic 651 ARTS Saint Clair Cemin, L'lntuition de L'lnstant, 1995 BAM 2000 Spring Season is sponsored by PHILIP MORRIS ~lA6(8Ill CO M PA NI ES IN C. Contents • Apri I 2000 Royal Family 8 The Royal Shakespeare Company presents T. S. Eliot's The Family Reunion, the first of three productions that the renowned company is bringing to BAM. By Mark Fisher Martyr Music 14 Next month, Les Arts Florissants, under the direction of William Christie, will perform a semi-staged version of Handel's oratorio Theodora. By Patrick Giles Program 17 Upcoming Events 40 BAMdirectory 50 Photo by Michel Szabo I3A 1\/1 Co\/pr Arti,t Saint Clair Cemin Saint Clair Cemin was born in Cruz Alta, Brazil , in 1951. He studied at the Ecole Nationale L'lntuition de L'lnstant Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris, France. He lives in New York City. 1995 Painted wood Cemin's sculpture has been exhibited worldwide, including at the Hirshhorn Museum and 97' x 91 ' x 36' Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Museo de Arte Contemporary, Monterey, Mexico; California Center for the Arts Museum, Escondido, CA; Centro Cultural For BAMart information Light, Rio de Janiero, Brazil; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; The Arts Club contact Deborah Bowie at of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Stiidische Kunstha lle, Dusseldorf, Germany; The Fredrik Roos Museum , Malmo, Sweden; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Whitney Museum 718.636.4111 ext. 380 of American Art Biennial, New York, NY; Centro Atlantico de Arte Modemo, Las Palmas, Grand Canary Island; Documenta IX, Kassel, Germany; 22nd Biennial Intemational, Funda9lo de sao Paolo; Galleria Communale d'Arte Modema, Bologna, Italy; Fogg Art Museum , Cambridge, MA; and the Kunsthalle, Basel, Switzerland. His work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Fonds National d'Art Contemporain, Paris; Rooscum , Stockholm ; the Broad Foundation, Los Angeles. He has executed many private and public commissions including the Reston Town Center, Reston, VA, and the Fountain House, New York City. In 1995 he received the Biennial Award from the Ueno Royal Museum and the Hakone Open-Air Museum in Japan . A major monograph will be published on his work, and a book of his writings will be published in 2000. In addition, the first volume of his catalogue raisonne is now being prepared. 4 The Royal Shakespeare Company T. S. Eliot's position as one of the great poets of the 20th century is unassailed. The Missouri­ comes to BAM with Adrian Noble's born, Harvard-educated, British-domiciled writer production of T. S. Eliot's The is still considered one of the greats more than 50 years after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for lit­ Family Reunion. By Mark Fisher erature and 35 years after his death. To find a fan of T. S. Eliot the dramatist, however, is a chal­ lenge. True , The Cocktail Party, an unorthodox drama which mixed poetry, Existentialism, and drawing-room banter, played more than 200 per­ formances on Broadway after its London debut in 1949. True, The Elder Statesman was the most pre-booked play of the Edinburgh International Festival of 1958. True , there was a postwar cau­ cus that believed Eliot was at the vanguard of a latter-day resurgence in poetic drama and that a new Shakespeare was in their midst. But it's remarkable how many commentators , even at the time, resisted the argument that verse drama was where theater's future lay. The New York critic John Mason Brown accused The Cock­ tail Party, for example, of being "obscure," and of ending in "a pea-soup fog of mysticism"; in Lon­ don, J.e. Trewin said it was "unmemorable" and "mildly tedious"; and the celebrated Observer critic Kenneth Tynan put the play into prose to TS. Eliot show how it read like a Victorian melodrama. And 8 director Deborah Warner and Irish actor Fiona Shaw discovered in their production of The Waste Land-one of the hottest tickets in town when it played in a deserted warehouse in Toronto in 1996, and later on 42nd Street in New York City. Unsurprisingly, this isn't how Royal Shakespeare Company director Adrian Noble sees it at all. For him, the supposedly uncomfortable blend of clas­ sical tragedy and drawing-room drama was never an issue. "I understand what people mean by that, but it was not my impression when I read [Family Reunion], and when I rehearsed it, I found that those tensions could be resolved in a very creative way," says the 50-year-old director, who first tack­ led Eliot in a revival of Murder in the Cathedral in 1993. "The problem when it was first produced was not with the play, but with the context in which it was performed-the bourgeois West End theater of the day. I don't think they knew what hit them. It was years and years ahead of its time." Using a hard-to-spot blank verse, only apparent in moments of high passion, Eliot said he aimed to A scene from the RSC's production of The Family Reunion write about "men and women as we know them, that was a relative hit compared to the first pro­ in the usual clothes that they wear today, in the duction of The Family Reunion. When that play same perplexities, conflicts, and misunderstand­ was revived by Peter Brook in 1956 in a London ings that we and our acquaintances get involved production starring Paul Scofield, Tynan said that in, and uttering no lines that are not relevant to the although Eliot "can always lower the dramatic situation, the mood, and the dramatic action." The temperature, he can never raise it; and this is why Family Reunion was an ambitious attempt to the theater must ultimately reject him." marry the grandeur of Greek tragedy to the acces­ sibility of popular 20th-century drama. Eliot had-and still has-his supporters of course, but it sometimes seems that his most lasting con­ On one level, it works as a murder mystery in the tribution to the theater will not be for his plays, but manner of an Agatha Christie: an aristocratic fam­ his influence over others. His tempestuous private ily, a stately home, a whiff of adultery, and the life was the inspiration behind Michael Hastings' suspicion of death by foul play. On another level, Tom and Viv, the biographical drama which trans­ it's nothing less than a retelling of the Orestes story ferred to the big screen in 1994 with Willem as told by Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragic Dafoe as Eliot and Miranda Richardson as his drama, 2,400 years earlier. Look at it either as the unhappy wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood. Eclipsing that story of a modern man who returns home con­ in popularity (along with everything else he ever vinced that he's responsible for the death at sea of wrote) is Eliot's posthumous collaboration with his wife, or as a drama of existential profundity. It Andrew Lloyd Webber on Cats, the intemational has the stock characters of 1930s British drama hit musical. How ironic that his most frivolous (the maid, the chauffeur, and the slow-witted work-Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, dat­ policeman), and it has a chorus of Furies crawling ing from 1939, the same year as The Family out from the netherworld . It's an old-school pot­ Reunion-should have tumed out to be his boiler that just happens to be about sin, biggest money-spinner. Yet, even his most redemption, and the burden of responsibility. Like demanding poetry can seem a more appealing Shakespeare, Eliot was aiming to appeal to high- theatrical prospect than his plays, as the British brow and groundling alike. ~ 10 "He was consciously using the drawing-room uncluttered production is the best account of it I tradition, but the play prefigures Beckett and have seen." On the other hand , there is the lin­ the absurdist playwrights by staging the inner gering suspicion that, as the American critic life of the characters," says Noble who, having Harold Clurman once wrote, "T.S . Eliot's dramatic been artistic director of the world's most ventures are experiments in the translation for the acclaimed Shakespearean company since popular playhouse of what he had already said 1991, is interested both in plays that influ­ far more valuably in his poetry." enced Shakespeare and plays that Shakespeare influenced. "In that sense, he is going right Noble agrees that the poetic drama movement back to the Elizabethan tradition." spearheaded by Eliot does seem to have been a theatrical dead end, but, in general terms, he Noble adds: "We found some interesting things in believes the poet's writing should be a treasured rehearsal. I set off directing it as a drawing-room part of a still-thriving tradition. "It's part of a tradi­ comedy, with furniture and sofas, and it really tion of writers using heightened, formal writing wasn't fitting, it didn't feel comfortable. Slowly, I and that is not dead at all," Noble says. "You'll started stripping stuff away. It was very similar to a see that in Harold Pinter and all the Irish writers. Shakespeare play in that if you have too realistic They're not slice-of-life writers, and he's in that scenery, you find that the verse is irrelevant. You medium . He used distilled writing because that don't need language if you have all the pictures up was his natural medium.