this week in theater

R.U.R.

Karel Čapek’s “R.U.R.” examines the classic battle between man and machine (photo by Jon Kandel)

Beckett Theatre, Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Through February 2, $18
www.resonanceensemble.org

“There’s no progress. There’s never any progress,” engineer Josef Alquist (Chris Ceraso) says at the beginning of Resonance Ensemble’s revival of Karel Čapek’s 1920 play, R.U.R. The seldom-performed work, being presented at the Beckett Theatre at Theatre Row in a 2002 adaptation by Lee Eric Shackleford that modernizes some of the story, is most well known for its lasting legacy: Not only did the play introduce the word “robot” to the international lexicon (Čapek credited the actual invention of the term to his brother Joseph), but it also set up many of the themes that continue to dominate science-fiction tales today. Set in the 2030s on isolated Rossum Island in the South Pacific, R.U.R., which stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots, follows a small group of scientists and businessmen who are making and selling mechanical men and women to serve in various capacities, from butlers and maids to sexual partners. Helena Gloriov (Christine Bullen) arrives from the League of Humanity, concerned that these robots, which contain organic matter, are being treated like slaves. She has an ethical discussion with Henry Domin (Brad Makarowski), a former lover and current head of R.U.R., about the sentience of such robots as his personal assistant, Sulla (Jane Cortney), who is remarkably lifelike, but he insists, “She’s not alive. She’s a machine with no more notion that she’s alive than she would if she was a geranium in a flowerpot.” But as the serious Dr. Fabry (Matt W. Cody), the jittery Dr. Gall (Kevin Bernard), and the sex-starved, goofy Dr. Hallemeier (Mac Brydon) can’t stop playing god and “improving” their creations in secret new ways, one of the robots, Radius (Tyler Caffall), begins to get ideas of his own, setting up a classic battle of man vs. machine.

A dark future awaits humanity in Karel Čapek’s prescient “R.U.R.” (photo by Jon Kandel)

Directed by Valentina Fratti (Two Brothers, Howling Hilda), R.U.R. is set in a futuristic white room in which the characters debate the ethics and responsibilities of what they’re doing in a world where the number of robots are increasing while the amount of human births is dropping precipitously. The story is told in flashback by Alquist (strongly played by Ceraso), the only human on the island who still works with his hands; he is recording a message about what happened, and things look pretty bleak. Shackleford has updated elements of the plot, adding references to stem cells, for example, to avoid feeling too old-fashioned, but the play still has plenty of clunky moments that reveal its age. Yet even after all these years, it continues to bring up fascinating issues and ethical dilemmas that remain compelling even though we’ve seen them since in the works of Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Philip K. Dick and such television shows as The Twilight Zone. To further put Čapek’s (War with the Newts) work in perspective, Resonance Ensemble is performing R.U.R. in repertory with Richard Manley’s The Truth Quotient, which also examines the impact of technology on humanity; in addition, several of the performances will be followed by talk backs with artistic director Eric Parness, the playwrights, and various technology experts. (Fun fact: Spencer Tracy played a robot in the 1953 Broadway version of R.U.R.)

UNDER THE RADAR

The Belarus Free Theatre will present MINSK 2011: A REPLY TO KATHY ACKER at the 2013 Under the Radar festival (photo by Nicolai Khalezin)

The Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. between East Fourth St. & Astor Pl.
January 9-20, free-$30 (most shows $20)
212-967-7555
www.undertheradarfestival.com

The newly renovated Public Theater is home once again to the annual Under the Radar festival, two weeks of experimental works that challenge the traditional nature of theater. Iranian actor Afshin Hashemi uses household objects and toys to prepare for his impending doom in the Leev Theater Group’s Hamlet, Prince of Grief. Christina Anderson’s Hollow Roots, performed by April Matthis, examines race and gender. In Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, Australia’s Back to Back Theatre focuses on the Hindu god Ganesh’s attempts to reclaim the ancient swastika symbol from the Nazis. The Nature Theater of Oklahoma explores existence itself in the eleven-hour epic Life and Times. Fleur Elise Noble creates an alternate reality in the multimedia performance installation 2 Dimensional Life of Her. Toshiki Okada teams up with the Pig Iron Theatre Company for Zero Cost House. Taylor Mac will present A 20th Century Abridged Concert of the History of Popular Music in a mere ninety minutes. And Lemon Andersen’s work-in-progress ToasT looks at the black oral narrative tradition. In addition, UTR 2013 features such discussions as “The Role of the Everyman in Culture, Media and Art”; “The Six O’Clock News,” which offers insider tips to upcoming shows each night; and a two-day symposium of talks, performances, panels, and more. After checking out a show, most of which go for a mere twenty bucks, stop by the festival lounge, where you’re liable to meet members of the cast and crew and catch live music and DJ sets by the likes of Andersen, the Bengsons, JoAnnibal the Cannibal, Branden Jacob-Jenkins, AndrewAndrew, Suzan Lori-Parks with Dan Zanes, and others.

COIL: THERE THERE

Kristen Kosmas is beguiling as a proofreader forced into replacing Christopher Walken in a one-man Chekhov show in THERE THERE (photo by Paul Willis)

KRISTEN KOSMAS: THERE THERE
The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Ave. LIC
January 5, 9-12, $20
718-482-7069
www.ps122.org/coil-2013
www.chocolatefactorytheater.org

Kristen Kosmas is one of those mesmerizing performers who could delight audiences simply by reading the phone book. In her latest work, however, Kosmas delves into something just a little bit more complicated. In There There, she plays a proofreader named Karen who suddenly has to substitute for Christopher Walken when the Oscar-winning actor falls off a ladder and is unable to present his one-man show based on Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters. So Karen is forced to go on, accompanied by Leo (actress and painter Larisa Tokmakova, who also appeared in Kosmas’s Palomino), a Russian translator who speaks just a split second behind Karen’s dialogue. In a room featuring two rows of chairs on either side, the action takes place in the space between them and at a podium as Kosmas gracefully goes back and forth between the characters of Karen and Vassily Vasilyevich Solyony, the army captain who gets in a duel with Baron Nikolaj Lvovich Tuzenbach over the love of Irina Sergeyevna Prozorova. Surrounded by prints of Russian Constructivist paintings and a wall of portraits of aristocratic military men, Kosmas (Hello Failure) explores the nature of character, desire, obsession, language, communication, and performance itself in a breezy seventy-five minutes. She regularly uses her warm, welcoming eyes to make direct contact with audience members, luring them in to her fractured narrative that even includes a brief foray into Little Anthony and the Imperials’ “Goin’ Out of My Head.” “I want you to want me / I need you so badly / I can’t think of anything but you,” Karen softly sings, her back to the audience, the song as much about the captain’s desire for Irina as Kosmas’s connection to the crowd. Directed by Paul Willis, who previously helmed Kosmas’s The Scandal! and Chapter of Accidents, the extraordinary There There continues January 9-12 at the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City as part of the eighth annual COIL Festival presented by PS122.

COIL 2013

Multiple venues
January 3-19, $20-$30 per performance, $75 passport for five shows, $122 for ten
www.ps122.org

Every January, Performance Space 122 uncoils its COIL festival, several weeks of cutting-edge experimental dance, theater, art, and music. The 2013 winter celebration runs January 3-19 at multiple venues in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens but not at PS122 itself, which is undergoing a major renovation. COIL actually got an early start last month with Kristen Kosmas’s There There at the Chocolate Factory (through January 12), in which a woman has to suddenly replace Christopher Walken in a one-person show with the help of her Russian translator. Radiohole presents the world premiere of Inflatable Frankenstein at the Kitchen January 5-19, offering an unusual look at Mary Shelley’s book and James Whale’s film. In fall 2011, Emily Johnson brought her dazzlingly original The Thank-You Bar to New York Live Arts; now she and her Catalyst company is bringing Niicugni to the Baryshnikov Arts Center, a work that explores time and place. Annie Dorsen and Anne Juren examine femininity through a magic show with nudity in Magical, making its U.S. premiere January 15-19 at New York Live Arts. The BodyCartography Project follows up its 2011 COIL presentation, Symptom, with Super Nature, an ecological dance at Abrons Arts Center with live music by Zeena Parkins and scenic installation by Emmett Ramstad that is also part of the fourth annual American Realness festival. Other performances include the return of Pavel Zuštiak / Palissimo’s Amidst and Brian Rogers’s Hot Box. From January 15 to 18, COIL will host SPAN, a free noon dialogue with some of the artists, and the annual Red + White Party takes place January 13 at SPiN NYC with Ping-Pong, the Vintage DJ, and the National Theater of the United States of America. COIL offers a great opportunity to experience exciting new directions in the multidisciplinary arts, and with most tickets no more than twenty dollars and running times less than seventy minutes, you can’t give much of an excuse not to check a few things out.

PROJECT SHAW: MISALLIANCE

The Players Club
16 Gramercy Park South
Monday, January 28, $30, 7:00
www.projectshaw.com

“All this damned materialism: what good is it to anybody?” Tarleton says in George Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance: A Debate in One Sitting. “Ive got a soul: dont tell me I havnt. Cut me up and you cant find it. Cut up a steam engine and you cant find the steam. But, by George, it makes the engine go. Say what you will, Summerhays, the divine spark is a fact.” The New York-based Gingold Theatrical Group has been keeping Shaw’s divine spark lit since January 2006, when founder and artistic director David Staller began Project Shaw with the mission “to carve a permanent niche for the work of George Bernard Shaw within the social and cultural life of New York — to bring his canon and humanist precepts to larger audiences and encourage people to practice these ideals in their daily lives.” By December 2009, Project Shaw had performed all sixty-five of Shaw’s plays, but that didn’t stop them, as they continue to present Shaw to the public at the Players Club on monthly Mondays. The 2013 season kicks off on January 28 with the sociopolitical comedy Misalliance, featuring Richard Easton as Lord Summerhays, Jay O. Sanders as John Tarleton, Maryann Plunkett as Mrs. Tarleton, Alison Fraser as Lina, Robert Creighton as Julius “Gunner” Baker, Wesley Taylor as Bentley, Hannah Cabell as Hypatia, Jon Fletcher as Johnny Tarleton, Zachary Spicer as Joey Percival, and Maggie Buchwald as the Narrator. The season continues with Caesar and Cleopatra on February 25, a St. Patrick’s Day Gala on March 17, Admirable Bashville on April 29, Mrs. Warren’s Profession on May 20, and Too True to Be Good on June 24. All tickets are $30 and should be reserved in advance. “We are made wise not by the recollection of our past but by the responsibility for our future,” Shaw once explained, and in many ways that is precisely what Project Shaw is all about.

GOLDEN AGE

Sicilian composer Vincenzo Bellini (Lee Pace) and diva Maria Malibran (Bebe Neuwirth) discuss art and love in Terrence McNally’s GOLDEN AGE (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club
New York City Center Stage 1
Through January 13, $85
www.goldenageplay.com

In It’s Only a Play, Terrence McNally took audiences behind the scenes of a Broadway production’s opening night. In The Lisbon Traviata and Master Class, McNally focused on opera star Maria Callas. He brings those two themes together in the light but charming Golden Age. Sicilian composer Vincenzo Bellini (Lee Pace) is presenting the world premiere of I puritani on January 24, 1835, at the Théâtre-Italien in Paris, the first of his operas to open outside Italy. The composer of such previous triumphs as I Capuleti e i Montecchi, La sonnambula, and Norma is joined by a quartet of popular singers who just might be as famous as he is: baritone Antonio Tamburini (Lorenzo Pisoni), who continually stuffs vegetables down his pants to enhance his manhood; soprano Giulia Grisi (Dierdre Friel), who cannot decide how much jewelry to wear when she takes the stage; bass Luigi Lablache (Ethan Phillips), who laments the always minor roles given to those of his vocal range; and tenor Giovanni Battista Rubini (Eddie Kaye Thomas), who is preparing to hit a high F-natural above high C that has never before been achieved. At Bellini’s side is his biographer and lover, Francesco Florimo (Will Rogers).

Luigi Lablache (Ethan Phillips) and Giulia Grisi (Dierdre Friel) get serious during premiere of Bellini’s I PURITANI (photo by Joan Marcus)

Tony-winning director Walter Bobbie (Venus in Fur, Chicago) has the four Puritans move from individual dressing rooms to backstage area (where Bellini makes use of a piano) and then up steps to the opera hall on Santo Loquasto’s dramatic set, their singing “voices” heard in the background as those still downstairs discuss the French versus the Italians (and the English), egotistically praise their own talents, debate whether the composer or singer is more important, and wonder about who is in the audience, from rival composers such as Donizetti and Rossini (George Morfogen) to such other opera stars as Giovanni Matteo Mario and Maria Malibran (Bebe Neuwirth). When the Malibran does indeed show up, the talk turns to love, romance, and heartbreak as well. Combining factual events with his vivid imagination, four-time Tony winner McNally (Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, Love! Valour! Compassion!) investigates the nature of art and its very creation in Golden Age, exploring inspiration, influence, and truth. What is occurring backstage often mimics what is happening in the opera itself, especially as Grisi gets ready for her mad scene and various characters declare their love for others. The acting is exemplary throughout, ranging from appropriately bombastic to somewhat more subdued, with Neuwirth a standout as she poetically recites a song by Bellini. And McNally and Bobbie have crafted Golden Age in such a way that the audience doesn’t need to know anything about opera, or be an opera fan at all, in order to enjoy this inside look at a magical moment in time.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: THE HOLIDAY GUYS IN “HAPPY MERRY HANU-MAS!”

York Theatre Company at Saint Peter’s
619 Lexington Ave. at 54th St.
Through December 31, $59.50
212-935-5820
www.yorktheatre.org
www.theholidayguys.net

’Tis the season for holiday songs, and a pair of Broadway stars are taking a unique angle on traditional classics in The Holiday Guys in “Happy Merry Hanu-Mas.” Three-time Tony nominee Marc Kudisch (9 to 5, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Thoroughly Modern Millie) and multiple-award nominee Jeffry Denman (Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, Yank!: A World War II Love Story) have teamed up for a seasonal show filled with holiday favorites from numerous denominations and musical genres. The Jewish Kudisch, who sings and plays the guitar, and the Christian Denman, who sings and taps and plays the ukulele and the djembe, perform such songs as “Jingle Bells,” “My Simple Christmas Wish,” South Park’s “Lonely Jew on Christmas,” “The Jazzy Nutcracker,” “Put One Foot in Front of the Other,” and “O Hanukkah O Christmas Tree” during eighty irreverent and playful minutes, part of their “mission to remind everyone what the holidays are really about.”

Marc Kudisch and Jeffry Denman take aim at the holidays in seasonal musical

TICKET GIVEAWAY: The Holiday Guys is currently running through December 31 at the York Theatre Company, and twi-ny has four pairs of tickets to give away for free. Just send your name, daytime phone number, and all-time-favorite holiday song to contest@twi-ny.com by Wednesday, December 19, at 5:00 to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; four winners will be selected at random.