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

Theatre 283
1992, and most recently (2011) Lay Me Down Easy
are all solo narratives, in multiple voices, that portray
verbatim testimonies from people embroiled in major
crises: the days of rage in Crown Heights, Brooklyn,
following the violent deaths of an African American
and a Hasidic Jew; the Los Angeles riots following
the acquittal of white police officers charged with
the beating of the black motorist, Rodney King; and
the current crisis in health care. Many solo performances
are autobiographical; Colombian-born John
Leguizamo’s performances of Freak and Sexaholix,
both set in Leguizamo’s childhood borough of Queens
(New York), are hugely comic and often deeply poignant
autobiographical journeys of his childhood and
adolescence; his 2011 Broadway hit, Ghetto Klown,
describes his later battles trying to combine a stage
and film career with fame, family, and friendships.
PUPPET PERFORMANCE
The theatre does not always limit itself to human performers.
Puppet theatre in one form or another has
flourished since ancient Egyptian times. In the eastern
forms of Indonesian wayang kulit and Japanese bunraku,
puppetry has been a major format for more than a thousand
years; in the West, it has provided children’s entertainment
since the commedia dell arte, with Punch and
Judy shows in England and “Guignol” performances in
France still performed regularly. Today’s global theatre,
however, has seen a considerable increase in puppetry for
adult audiences in the West and East alike, particularly
in the avant-garde, where Peter Schumann’s politically
active Bread and Puppet Theatre has become prominent
in America since the 1960s and Shockheaded Peter, a
British adaptation of a nineteenth-century German tale,
The brilliant puppetry of theatre artist Rezo Gabriadze, from the Tblisi National Theatre Studio in formerly Soviet
Georgia, is abundantly evident in his production of The Battle of Stalingrad, which was presented in New York by
the Lincoln Center Theatre Festival in 2010. A fantasy about the intermingling of undying love and a hideous war,
of the interactions of men, women, horses, and even ants, it creates a dream-like atmosphere that could never be
realized solely by human actors. © Stephanie Berger