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

302 Chapter 10 Global Theatre Today
against a horizon that shifts from white to blue to red
according to the Prince’s mood, Wilson’s Hamlet presents
the Shakespearean text as a sort of deathbed meditation
on the play’s confounding events and discoveries.
While Wilson sometimes works with conventional
plays and operas, his script editing, interpretation, and
staging are more postmodern and revisionist. Huge
props, scenery with bold colors, the sudden appearance
of alternate texts, the free mingling of humans and puppets,
nontraditional casting, and extreme slow-motion
stage movements all characterize Wilson’s highly stylized
stagings. His 1998 Monsters of Grace, an “opera
for the twenty-first century” with music by long-time
collaborator Philip Glass, is based on a thirteenth century
text by the Turkish whirling dervish, Jalaluddin
Rumi, and employs three-dimensional film technology.
His 2014 two-character The Old Woman, based on a
little-known poem by Daniil Kharms and featuring the
famed ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov and the American
actor Willem Dafoe, drew long standing ovations
in Los Angeles. “I hate ideas,” Wilson states, “that’s
why my theatre is different, noninterpretive. Interpretation
is for the audience.” As he approaches the third
decade of the twenty-first century, Wilson is becoming
more prolific than ever and leaving us more and more
to interpret.
YASMINA REZA
Few foreign-language dramatists regularly see their
works performed on American or British stages, much
less receive national awards for them. However, the
Great actors as well as great plays attract audiences, and an all-star cast of Marcia Gay Harden, Hope Davis, Jeff
Daniels, and James Gandolfini was assembled—all are onstage almost the entire evening—for the Broadway
production of God of Carnage by French playwright Yasmina Reza, which won the 2009 Tony for best play.
Seeming at first a realistic drama—two couples politely trying to come to terms about a playground fight between
their eleven-year-old sons—the play quickly becomes a riotous farce about social and gender differences in the
contemporary urban upper-middle class. The distinguished actors excelled in every role. Harden received the Tony
for her performance, and Gandolfini was nominated for one. The brilliantly paced direction was by Matthew Warchus,
who also won the Tony; Mark Thompson designed the highly stylized contemporary apartment. © Joan Marcus