SITI company’s unique take on the Bard runs at DTW through October 16
Dance Theater Workshop
219 West 19th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Through October 16, $35, 7:00 (both shows $50 on Friday and Saturday nights)
212-924-0077
www.dtw.org
www.siti.org
Using Orson Welles’s edited radio script of MACBETH, directors Anne Bogart and Darron L West lead SITI Company on an eerie but engaging retelling of one of the Bard’s most haunted works. On a relatively sparse stage, a group of actors gather to rehearse a radio production of MACBETH. The performers and the chairs and tables move about as the troupe recites this abbreviated tale of Macbeth’s treacherous rise to power in Scotland. Not a word is spoken that is not from the original Shakespeare text, but as the familiar story unfolds, Bogart and West reveal aspects of the performers’ characters and relationships, creating a play within the play. Tension builds as Will Bond (Duncan, Macduff, Murderer, Doctor) expresses his displeasure that his wife (Ellen Lauren as Lady Macbeth) and the company lead (Stephen Duff Webber as Macbeth and Orson Welles) carry on an affair in full view of everyone. Things are continually going bump in the night as ladders fall and the Witch (Kelly Maurer) loudly bangs on a table with a piece of wood, bringing to the foreground the kind of sound effects used in radio’s heyday.
Bogart, SITI’s artistic director, and West, an award-winning sound designer, include inventive visual stimuli so it is not just a bunch of people sitting around reading from a script; at one point, the players line up chairs in the middle of the stage, and the actors sit down to depict the chain of succession leading to Macbeth’s becoming king. RADIO MACBETH runs through October 16 at Dance Theater Workshop, but as an added treat, the company will also present WAR OF THE WORLDS — THE RADIO PLAY, SITI’s unique staging of Welles’s classic 1938 broadcast, as part of a double feature on Friday and Saturday nights. The two shows have never been performed together; by putting them back-to-back, Bogart and West reveal how they developed RADIO MACBETH: It is as if the MACBETH rehearsal actually takes place immediately following the troupe’s on-air production of Howard Koch’s adaptation of the H. G. Welles thriller, adding more depth to the characters and also explaining why they seem so exhausted when they first take the stage in RADIO MACBETH.
Named Best Documentary at numerous film festivals across the country, MARWENCOL offers a surprising look inside the creative process and the fine line that exists between art and reality. On April 8, 2000, Mark Hogancamp was nearly beaten to death outside a bar in his hometown of Kingston, New York. He spent nine days in a coma and more than a month in the hospital before being released, suffering severe brain damage that has left his memory a blur. To help put his life back together, he began using toys and dolls — Barbies, celebrity replicas, army men — to re-create his personal journey. He makes dolls of his friends and relatives, the people he works with, and others, constructing an alternate WWII-era universe he calls Marwencol, complete with numerous buildings and plenty of Nazis. He captures the detailed story in photographs that are not only fascinating to look at but that also help him figure out who he was and who he can be. This miniature three-dimensional world is reminiscent of the two-dimensional one carefully fashioned by outsider artist Henry Darger in his fifteen-thousand-page manuscript, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, which also features an alternate reality involving military battles set amid stunning artwork. Director, producer, and editor Jeff Malmberg makes no judgments about Hogancamp, and asks the same of the audience. In his first full-length film, Malmberg shares the compelling story of a deeply troubled, flawed man suddenly forced to begin again, using art and creativity to bring himself back to life. He speaks with Hogancamp’s mother, his old roommate, the prosecutor who handled his case, and others who are first seen proudly holding the doll Hogancamp made of them. And Malmberg doesn’t turn away from the more frightening aspects of Hogancamp’s daily existence. MARWENCOL is an unforgettable portrait of lost identity and the long road to redemption.
In conjunction with his recent appearance at the New York Film Festival discussing his life and career and presenting his latest film, the five-and-a-half-hour CARLOS, about the notorious assassin Carlos the Jackal, BAMcinématek will be screening seventeen of French writer-director Olivier Assayas’s works, which range from ultracool flicks to boring dramas, but they’re almost always visually stunning, filled with cinematic references and hip music. The series begins October 9 with SUMMER HOURS, which falls somewhere in the middle of his oeuvre.
