Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 281
of painter-designer Gustav Klimt; Kaos, a dancetheatre
piece based on stories by Italian playwright
Luigi Pirandello that conveys tales of tragic madness,
sexual passion, and despair among the inhabitants of
a dusty Sicilian village; and her 2014 Chéri, a story
of love in Paris during the Belle Époque and starring
Amy Irving.
The dance-theatre of the present has also been
enhanced by innovative choreographers who work in
pure dance. A prize example of this is Susan Stroman,
who has choreographed for the New York City Ballet
as well as choreographing and directing Broadway’s
The Producers and The Scottsboro Boys. The versatile
Stroman scored an immense success with her all-butwordless
Contact in 2000, which surprisingly won the
Tony Award for best play while Stroman took the Tony
for best director. Billed as a “dance play,” Contact consists
of three separate pieces connected only by the
theme of romantic linkups: “Swinging,” in which Fragonard’s
famous eighteenth-century French painting of a
girl on a swing comes to life as a three-way sex romp;
“Did You Move?” a housewife’s seriocomic fantasy in
a chaotic, outer-borough, 1950s New York restaurant;
and the title piece, “Contact,” in which an alcoholic and
burnt-out advertising executive tries to commit suicide
after failing to make contact, in a high-voltage dance
club, with a sexy lady dazzlingly dressed in brilliant yellow.
(For more on Susan Stroman, see the photo essay in
the chapter titled “The Director.”)
One of the newest movement-based companies is
the Synetic Theatre in the Washington, D.C. suburb of
Arlington, Virginia. Founded in 2001 by a Georgian
expatriate couple, Paata and Irina Tsikurishvili, the Synetic
group (the word combines “synthesis” and “kinetic”)
performs completely wordless works. And yet their favorite
playwright is one of the world’s wordiest dramatists:
William Shakespeare. The plays’ missing words are not
replaced merely with music and ballet, but with intense
passion, persuasive actions, visible props and symbols,
and a surprising level of comedy and fantasy. Since there
are no words spoken, character intentions are physically
exhibited, as where, in their 2014 Hamlet, the Prince tells
Gertrude to “look upon this picture and on this.” For that
scene, Paata (playing Hamlet) grabs Gertrude (played by
Irina) and forces her to look at actors dressed and posing
as King Hamlet and King Claudius, who are seen
glaring at each other from opposite sides of the stage,
making their brotherly hatred all the more frightful. The
production’s intense choreography, created by Irina, and
its original musical score takes care of most of the rest,
and the Synetic’s wordless action creates a continuously
building arc of Shakespearean tragedy that regularly
receives standing ovations from the audience. In 2014,
the Tsikurishvili cofounders, already the winners of many
awards, were honored as “Washingtonians of the Year”
by Washingtonian magazine.
SOLO PERFORMANCE
Although Anton Chekhov wrote a short play for a single
actor (On the Harmfulness of Tobacco, in which the solo
character is a lecturer addressing his audience), only in
recent times have authors seriously entertained the possibilities
of full-length plays employing just one actor.
Sometimes these are little more than star vehicles or
extended monologues, often based on historical characters,
as, for example, Hal Holbrook’s long-running portrayal
of America’s great writer in Mark Twain Tonight,
James Whitmore’s rendition of America’s feisty thirtythird
president in Give ’Em Hell, Harry!, and Julie
Harris’s tours as Emily Dickinson in The Belle of
Amherst. More fully dramatized works followed in the
1990s, however, when Jay Presson Allen wrote two
intriguing and generally successful Broadway plays
for solo actors, most notably Tru, about novelist and
socialite Truman Capote in his last, despairing days.
Other noteworthy solo performance plays include Lily
Tomlin’s portrayal of all seventeen characters in Jane
Wagner’s amusing and affecting Search for Signs of
Intelligent Life in the Universe, Patrick Stewart’s oneman
presentation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas
Carol, in which the celebrated Shakespearean actor
(and Star Trek star) played all the roles, Jefferson Mays
playing forty roles, both men and women (and winning
the 2004 Tony Award for it) in Doug Wright’s I Am My
Own Wife, and Ed Harris’s great performance in Neil
LaBute’s Wrecks, a modern and solo version of Oedipus
Rex that premiered in Ireland in 2005.
More socially engaged solo performances, however,
have redefined the genre. Jeff Weiss’s epic narratives
of (presumably) his life on the Lower East
Side, collectively titled . . . And That’s How the Rent
Gets Paid, probably began the trend at the Performing
Garage in New York’s SoHo during the 1970s
and 1980s. In the next decade, Eric Bogosian’s series
of intense and penetrating performances, savage and
comic by turns, featured an indelible cast of American
low-life characters—pimps and whores, addicts
and agents, executives and rock stars, panhandlers and
jocks (Drinking in America; Sex, Drugs, and Rock &
Roll; Wake Up and Smell the Coffee). Anna Deveare
Smith’s Fires in the Mirror, Twilight: Los Angeles