Strangers in Paradise
When you think about it, it’s surprising that it didn’t happen sooner—but it just never did. Miss Universal Happiness, opening later this month at New York’s Performing Garage, is the first collaboration between avant-garde theatre artist Richard Foreman and the Wooster Group.
Over the last two decades, Foreman has directed and designed 36 productions in the United States and Europe, including Threepenny Opera, Don Juan, Penguin Touquet and last summer’s The Golem for the New York Shakespeare Festival. Meanwhile, the Wooster Group has amassed a formidable repertoire: six ensemble pieces including Rumstick Road and Route 1 & 9; a play by Jim Strahs called North Atlantic; and eight autobiographical monologues written and performed by Spalding Gray.
“We have always admired each others’ work,” notes Wooster Group artistic director Elizabeth LeCompte. “The opportunity to work together just never came up before. But when Richard said he’d like to work with us, we said, ‘Great!’”
Written, designed and directed by Foreman, Miss Universal Happiness will feature performances by Wooster Group members Jim Clayburgh, Willem Dafoe, Peyton Smith, Kate Valk, Ron Vawter and others, including LeCompte herself, who does not as a rule perform in the company’s pieces. She describes her decision to tread the boards again in two words: “Sheer madness.” She insists she doesn’t regret the choice, though: “A long time ago, when I was still acting, it was my dream to be in a Foreman play. Well, I’m finally getting my chance.”
There have been other changes of routine for the long-time collaborators of the Wooster Group. Says LeCompte, “Working on Miss Universal Happiness has been a process totally different from the way we usually work. We are accustomed to developing our pieces throughout the course of rehearsal. In this case, Foreman is the writer and the director. He wrote the piece with us in mind, and we’re all working together on staging it—but he’s the writer. It’s a new kind of exploration.”
Foreman offers his own colorful description of the piece: “It invokes the efforts, dreams and frustrations of third world people (bearing in mind that most of us, even in America, are “third world” vis-à-vis the amorphous powers that be). Miss Universal Happiness herself lives amongst the downtrodden but her talents are not properly utilized. As a result, theatrical bursts of passion and ecstasy and hysteric gaiety cannot sustain themselves, and the play is a tragedy. It is, finally, a fiesta of madness, a picture of a world alternating between celebration and horror, in anticipation of a future paradise that still might, possibly, arrive.”
The play opens its six-week run on May 14, after which it will go into the Wooster Group’s permanent repertoire.
—Laura Ross
Chekhov in Chicago
Peter Riegert, left, is Lopakhin, Lindsay Crouse is Mme. Ranevskaya and Colin Stinton is Gaev in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, the first production of the New Theatre Company at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. Collaboration is the byword of the recently formed company, as demonstrated by the production’s artistic roster: Gregory Mosher directed, David Mamet provided a new adaptation, and designers Michael Merritt, Nan Cibula and Kevin Rigdon provided scenery, costumes and lighting, respectively (the same team shared credits on Glengarry Glen Ross). The Cherry Orchard ran through March 31, and NTC’s inaugural season continues with an evening of new Mamet works, The Shawl and The Spanish Prisoner, running through May 19, and John Guare’s Women and Water.
Welcome to the Joyce
Three of America’s leading resident theatres will visit New York beginning this month, as part of the first American Theater Exchange hosted by the Joyce Theatre. The subscription series is a co-producing venture, with the Joyce carrying the bulk of the cost, and artistic control over the productions remaining squarely with the presenting companies.
“It’s most important to us that it be their showcase,” notes festival coordinator Terry Fitzpatrick, “so that our audiences can see the productions as they were originally conceived.”
The Yale Repertory Theatre will open the festival on May 30 with Faulkner’s Bicycle, Heather McDonald’s play which premiered during the Rep’s recent Winterfest of new works. Next it will be Christmas in July, as the Alley Theatre of Houston brings Alan Ayckbourn’s Season’s Greetings to the Joyce. Staged by Alley artistic director Pat Brown, the farce runs July 6-27. The final offering of the festival will be the Mark Taper Forum’s widely traveled and greatly acclaimed In the Belly of the Beast, adapted from the writings of Jack Henry Abbott by Adrian Hall with additional adaptation and direction by Robert Woodruff. The Taper production runs throughout August.
Hopes are high that the American Theater Exchange will become an annual summer event at the Joyce, which until now has been dedicated primarily to the presentation of dance companies.
Vienna Rotation
If, in fact, there is such a thing as “spring fever” in southern California, no one at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum can afford to submit to it. For while some theatres are winding down their producing seasons, their weary staff members thinking about vacations, the Taper is launching into its annual repertory festival, a two-month, two-play rotating schedule now in its fifth season. As in the past, a single ensemble of actors has been assembled for the occasion.
This year’s festival opens on June 8 with the West Coast premiere of Undiscovered Country, a bittersweet comedy by Arthur Schnitzler set in a turn-of-the-centry Austrian villa. Tom Stoppard’s version of the play will be directed by Ken Ruta, and it will run through Aug. 4.
Joining the repertory on June 13 will be Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, one of his most complex psychological examinations of people on the brink of moral, cultural and political collapse. Robert Egan, resident director at the Taper, directs the play, which also runs through Aug. 4.
“As you can see, there’s more than the ambience of Vienna and a company of actors that link our two repertory plays,” comments artistic director Gordon Davidson. “Both take a deep look at the relationship between how societal mores are shaped and formed by psychological forces, particularly sexual ones. These plays probe into those dark corners beneath the everyday ritual of human transaction.”
Running a Marathon
After an unusual and intensive fundraising campaign designed to recruit “producing angels” from within the entertainment industry, the Ensemble Studio Theatre managed to marshal the funds to present its eighth annual Marathon of one-act plays. As always, the roster of playwrights for the ambitious three-series, 12-play festival is studded with well-known names. In addition to any magnanimous reasons that might have compelled commercial producers to contribute, producing angels were offered “first peek” at the properties selected for this year’s Marathon: they were invited to read scripts and attend rehearsals and opening nights. Home Box Office, the largest contributor, donated $10,000 for the privilege of a preview.
Series A of the festival opens on May 1 with Life under Water by Richard Greenberg; Mariens Kammer by Roger Hedden; The Frog Prince by David Mamet; and Men Without Dates by Jane Willis.
Series B, opening May 8, includes The Road to the Graveyard by Horton Foote; Desperadoes by Keith Reddin; Aggressive Behavior by Stuart Spencer; and Between Cars by Alan Zweibel.
Series C begins on May 24 and features North of Providence by Edward Allan Baker; The Semi-Formal by Louisa Jerauld; Painting a Wall by David Lan; and The Happy Hour by Shel Silverstein.
The entire festival runs in repertory through June 10, and at press time, the plays were still subject to change. “One of our principal objectives is to save the one-act play form,” notes artistic director Curt Dempster. “Most of America’s major playwrights—Albee, Williams, O’Neill, Shepard—began with one-act plays, which helped them develop.”
Name Games
What’s in a name? When it’s the name of a theatre quite a lot. For that reason, two companies have announced that they’ll be printing new letterheads in time for their upcoming seasons.
Cleveland’s Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival will be the Great Lakes Theatre Festival when its begins its 24th season in July. According to the company’s new artistic director, Gerald Freedman, the revised name more closely reflects the broad classical repertoire that has been the rule for the organization for some years. “We believe the change will help us attract new audience members who enjoy many types of theatre but who have not attended the Festival because they think we offer only one product,” added board president Thomas G. Stafford. Lest anyone worry that the Bard is being abandoned, the first play of the season is to be Twelfth Night, staged by Freedman and opening July 12.
The 10-year-old Nassau Repertory Theatre has just become the Long Island Stage Company, according to chairman of the board George Gimpel. The switch came in conjunction with the expansion and strengthening of the organization’s board with representation from Long Island’s leading corporations. According to Gimpel, “The new name was adopted in view of the theatre’s emergence as Long Island’s leading professional company, serving audiences in Queens and Suffolk counties as well as Nassau. Currently on view at the theatre is P.J. Barry’s Baby Grand, staged by artistic director Clinton J. Atkinson.
All in the Family
The Family, founded 12 years ago as a theatre training program for inmates in New York and New Jersey prisons, will soon have a “cousin” in France.
According to founder and artistic director Marvin Felix Camillo, the establishment of a second Family in the Bordeaux region of France is the result of two years of exchanges between American company members and French directors, actors and technicians that began with a visit to the International Theatre Festival in Nancy. Since then, Family members have led workshops and performances in French penal institutions, paving the way for a French branch of the organization to operate on its own.
The Family came to prominence in this country in 1976, when Short Eyes, a prison drama by ex-inmate and Family member Miguel Pinero, was produced by the group first at Theatre at the Riverside Church and then under the aegis of the New York Shakespeare Festival, garnering the New York Drama Critics Circle Best Play Award. Since then, the Family has added many facets to its work, including the Family Repertory Company which presents three plays per season; a Saturday night cabaret; workshops both in and outside prisons, emphasizing acting, singing, mime, technical skills and—particularly within prisons—playwriting. The Family has produced two plays by ex-offenders in the past two seasons. The repertory company is for the most part made up of ex-offenders and addicts and disadvantaged youths who have studied in its various programs. Over the years, the company has toured within the United States and performed in Amsterdam, Paris and Hamburg.
The recent decision to begin a similar program in France was cemented when French interns of Camillo’s program there prevailed upon private investors and government agencies to support the project. They managed to gain enough support to send for Camillo so that he might aid in the creation of the French organization.
City Lights
A 1930s showbiz satire that provided the Marx Brothers with one of their best known showcases recently regaled Pittsburgh Public Theater audiences anew with its inspired con-artistry. Room Service by John Murray and Allen Boretz, under the direction of Larry Arrick, featured, above from left, John Scherer, Allen Pinsker, Don Howard and Michael Lipton. Ursula Belden designed the show’s mar-quee-studded set, right, and Kristine Bick was responsible for the lighting design.
Bell & the Globe
As its directors vowed, the Old Globe’s new Lowell Davies Festival Stage—on the drawing board even as the theatre’s former outdoor facility was burned by arsonists last October—will be ready for this summer’s season. After a formal dedication ceremony on May 29, the new 613-seat, stadium-style theatre will kick into action with two plays in repertory throughout the summer: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Old Globe artistic director Jack O’Brien, and Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance. Midsummer is an especially appropriate work to inaugurate the new stage, as it is the very same play that opened the former outdoor stage in 1978—and O’Brien directed it then, too.
The other two stages of the Globe will be in full swing all summer as well. At the Cassius Carter Centre Stage, Greater Tuna, by Joe Sears, Jaston Williams and Ed Howard, alternates with Tina Howe’s Painting Churches. On the Old Globe stage, Noel Coward’s Hay Fever will share the bill with Richard III.
For its efforts, the Old Globe is receiving the kind of widespread exposure that organizations dream of: 1.3 million copies of the 1985 Pacific Bell Telephone Directory bearing a full-color night view of the Globe have been distributed throughout the area. Pacific Bell director of governmental relations Art Madrid explains, “Our concept is to selectively showcase institutions of standing in their communities, and it’s a fitting gesture to recognize one of America’s most prestigious theatres on its 50th anniversary.”
Kabuki Collaborators
A Contemporary Theatre’s ambitious six-play season kicks off in May with its first co-production with the neighboring Bathhouse Theatre. Under the direction of Arne Zaslove, artistic director of the Bathhouse, ACT presents an unusual King Lear, retaining all the original language but presented in a style based on Japanese Kabuki theatre. Lear runs May 2-June 2—a week longer than the usual ACT run, to allow all the subscribers to both theatres the opportunity to see it.
The second production of the season will be Sam Shepard’s True West, in its Seattle professional premiere. Directing the play will be John Dillon, artistic director of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. True West runs June 13-July 9, followed by the American premiere of David Edgar’s Maydays, an epic play created for England’s Royal Shakespeare Company last season. Maydays, playing July 14-Aug. 11, will be directed by Jeff Steitzer.
Harold Pinter’s Other Places, a collection of three one-act plays including A Kind of Alaska, Victoria Station and One for the Road, bows on Aug. 18 and runs through Sept. 15.
Rounding out the season will be Arthur Kopit’s End of the World, a timely satire about society’s attitudes toward nuclear war, and Simon Gray’s Quartermaine’s Terms, a poignant drama about an aging British schoolteacher and his colleagues.
Too Much to Bear
“When we began in 1974, we were a group of theatre dropouts from around the country who saw ourselves as the nucleus of an alternative theatre—a tight-knit ensemble dedicated to presenting original plays of a provocative and experimental nature,” says Michael Griggs, co-founder and artistic director of the Bear Republic Theater. “But a large and longstanding debt, an erratic audience, lack of sufficient financial support by local corporations and individuals and a growing incompatibility of visions have forced us to close the Bear.”
The Bear Republic was Santa Cruz’s oldest theatre company, presenting some 60 productions over its 11-year history. The company is still best remembered for its collectively created Signals, an early work which toured extensively, ending up at New York’s La Mama E.T.C. Workshops and productions specifically designed for schools, hospitals, prisons and convalescent homes were also part of the Bear agenda.
According to Griggs, as the company became better established in its community, it attempted to recast itself along more traditional lines. “Today with lucid hindsight,” he comments, “I see that was a role we were never really comfortable with and never took on wholeheartedly. So we became schizophrenic, trying to serve two valid but incompatible visions of the theatre.” There are currently no plans for the Bear to come out of hibernation in the near or distant future.
This Means War
Eccentric millionaire Philip Stone (Richard Halverson, left) scatters the pages of a playscript to the winds as playwright-cum-detective Michael Trent (Wayne S. Turney) and his agent Audrey West (Caitlin Hart) look on in alarm. The scene is from the Cleveland Play House’s current production of Arthur Kopit’s End of the World. The dark comedy, which probes contemporary attitudes about the threat of nuclear war, made a brief Broadway appearance last year. For its second-ever production, notes director Tom Riccio, Kopit “made several changes in the script, and allowed me several liberties of interpretation, making this production, I believe, the definitive one.” The playwright was also on hand for an audience symposium during the run, which continues through May 5.
Getting By
A handful of street people who spend their days crushing aluminum cans, trading “treasures” and just surviving, make up the cast of High Standards, an Alliance Theatre premiere that got its start through the theatre’s new play development project. After readings at the Atlanta company in 1983 and 1984, Tom Huey’s play—laced with fragments of memory and internal monologue—received a full production under the direction of Skip Foster at the Alliance Studio in February. The director and all of the actors including Al Hamacher and Brenda Bynum, seen here, were involved in the earlier staged readings.
Gangland Beat
A new musical comedy transformed the Hartford Stage Company into 1920s gangland Chicago last month. America’s Sweetheart, penned by John Weidman with book and lyrics by the Robber Bridegroom team of Alfred Uhry and Robert Waldman, centers on the legendary Al Capone, whose ownership of breweries, brothels, speakeasies and gambling casinos made him an underworld king—and a beloved outlaw in the public’s eyes. Moving to the beat of Chicago-style jazz, under the direction of Gerald Freedman, the Hartford production featured Stephen Vinovich as Capone. Sets were by Kevin Rupnik and costumes by Jeanne Button.
Briefly Noted
It was Shakespeare with a twist last month at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, when avant-garde director Geoffrey Sherman transported The Comedy of Errors to a 1926 silent film studio in Hollywood. The comedy of twins and mistaken identity—Shakespeare’s only farce—was embellished with caption cards, Keystone Cops, roving cameras and live piano music. In Sherman’s production, silent screen stars resembling Theda Bara, Mary Pickford, John Gilbert and Buster Keaton were caught in the process of making a film of The Comedy of Errors. But underneath all of the stage business—the horseplay, sight gags, double-takes and slow burns—Shakespeare’s language was preserved intact. Ben Jonson knew whereof he spoke when he described Shakespeare as a playwright “not of an age, but for all time.”
If you thought that Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach was the last word on the genius of relativity, then you haven’t heard about The Einstein Project, an Illusion Theater production bowing next month at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center. The play, which concerns the beauty, mystery and enormity of Einstein’s universe, is a collaborative effort of playwrights Paul D’Andrea and Jon Klein, director David Feldshuh, composer Kim D. Sherman, Illusion producers Michael Robins and Bonnie Morris, and the Illusion company. The last production in the Illusion’s 10th anniversary season, The Einstein Project can be seen at the Walker on June 20 and 21 as part of its “Center Stage” series. It will then move to the Illusion’s Studio where it will run through July 6. Audience-artist discussions will be held after each performance.
George Abbott, a legend in the American theatre, has written and directed more than 100 Broadway musicals over his long career, and at 97, he shows no signs of slowing down. Abbott’s new musical, Tropicana, opens at New York’s Musical Theatre Works on May 23. The story of a young man knee-deep in the political unrest of a Central American country, Tropicana includes a book by Abbott, music by Robert Nassif and lyrics by Peter Napolitano and Nassif. Abbott is directing, of course. An earlier version of the work premiered at the theatre’s reading program last season.
Tropicana will be the third and last new musical in MTW’s spring series, which also included All Girl Band, with book, music and lyrics by Bradford Craig, and the current Hamelin, with book, music and lyrics by Richard Jarboe and Harvey Shield.
