John Hurt listens to his past in KRAPP’S LAST TAPE, running at BAM through December 18 (photo by Richard Termine)
NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
Through December 18, $25-$90
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
Originally written in 1958 for British actor Patrick Magee, Samuel Beckett’s autobiographical Krapp’s Last Tape is a haunting examination of time, memory, and the futility of language. Performed over the years by the likes of Magee, Harold Pinter, Brian Dennehy, and Michael Gambon, the fifty-five-minute one-act is perhaps most closely identified today with John Hurt, who first appeared in the play at Dublin’s Gate Theatre in 1999, starred in Atom Egoyan’s 2001 film version, and is now giving a bravura command performance at BAM through December 18. Making his New York stage debut, Hurt (Midnight Express, 10 Rillington Place) plays a failed writer named Krapp who, when first seen, is sitting at a table in silence, an old lamp dangling overhead. He says nothing for several minutes and then eventually gets up, walks around in squeaky white shoes, consumes two bananas, slips on a peel he dropped on the floor, and carefully approaches the darkness on either side of him, deciding not to venture out of the lighted area, as if something unknown and dangerous awaits outside his very private, solitary comfort zone. It is a critical moment in the play, establishing the precipice of life and death that Krapp is balancing on while also reminding the audience that this is a staged production. As he does every year on his birthday, Krapp listens to reel-to-reel recordings of messages he left on previous birthdays and makes a new one; in this case, the sixty-nine-year-old shabbily dressed man is looking for the tape he made on his thirty-ninth, which, according to his dusty old ledger, can be found in “box five, spool three.” Krapp takes delight in drawing out the word spool like he is a child. As he listens to his old self discuss the past, present, and future as he saw it thirty years before, he starts and stops the tape, remembering some moments that elicit strong emotions while clearly having no memory of others, the fractured narrative tantalizing and teasing the audience. “Thirty-nine today,” the recorded Krapp says. “Sound as a bell.” But alas, the sixty-nine-year-old Krapp is not sound as a bell, with little but death to look forward to.
Director Michael Colgan and lighting designer James McConnell have placed Krapp in a masterfully minimalist black-and-white world, surrounded by darkness, the only colors the yellow of the bananas and the green in Krapp’s description of a former love’s coat. Hurt, now seventy-one, is a less angry, more fragile and perhaps desperate Krapp than he portrayed in previous versions, cupping his ear tighter as he leans his head to hear the tape, shuffling to the back — through a minefield of his past, the boxes of tapes strewn across the floor — to steal a drink, staring straight ahead, wondering what happened to the ambitious youth he once was. (He even resembles Beckett himself this time around.) Krapp’s Last Tape is an extraordinarily complex work that delves deep into the human psyche, a challenge for both the actor and the audience, a play that will stay with you for a long time, eliciting thoughts of where you’ve been, who you are, and what awaits you in the future. Hurt will participate in a post-show artist talk on December 15; in addition, BAMcinématek will be highlighting four of the British actor’s best films in “John Hurt Quartet,” including The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980) on December 12, Scandal (Michael Caton-Jones, 1989) on December 13 (followed by a Q&A with Hurt), Love and Death on Long Island (Richard Kwietniowski, 1997) on December 14, and Nineteen Eighty-Four (Michael Radford, 1984) on December 15.
Natalya Bondarchuk and Donatus Banionis star in Solaris, the Russian 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which something strange is going on in outer space that is unexplainable to both the characters in the film and the people in the audience. Banionis plays Chris Kelvin, who is sent to the Solaris space station to decide whether to put an end to the solaristics project that Burton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky) complicated twenty years before. What he discovers is one death, two possibly insane men, and his supposedly dead wife (Bondarchuk). Ambiguity reigns supreme in this gorgeously shot (in color and black and white by cinematographer Vadim Yusov) and scored (by Eduard Artemyev) film that, while technically science fiction, is really about the human conscience, another gem from master Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Nostalghia). See it whether or not you checked out Steven Soderbergh’s underrated remake with George Clooney and Natascha McElhone. Solaris is screening on November 27 as part of BAMcinématek’s “Sci-Fi Thanksgiving” series, which previously showed, appropriately enough, Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Get ready to smell the glove, and beware the patron saint of quality footwear. BAMcinématek is celebrating November 11, 2011 — 11/11/11 — with a special 11:11 pm screening of the greatest mockumentaries of them all, the towering classic This Is Spinal Tap. Rob Reiner’s triumphant tale follows the intimate lives of three heavy metal heads — Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), and Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) — and a series of highly flammable drummers as the band attempts a comeback. The hysterical film, which does indeed go all the way up to eleven, includes cameos by Bruno Kirby, Ed Begley Jr., Dana Carvey, Fran Drescher, Billy Crystal, Howard Hesseman, Paul Benedict, Paul Shaffer, Anjelica Huston, Fred Willard, and, yes, the one and only Patrick MacNee, as well as such unforgettable hits as “Hell Hole,” “Big Bottom,” “Sex Farm,” “Lick My Love Pump,” and, of course, “Stonehenge.” The screening will be followed by a Skype Q&A with Guest and Shearer in character; here’s hoping there are no electronic screw-ups like when Smalls gets stuck in a pod during one of the film’s funniest moments.
When this film first came out, there was a huge push under way to make Tony Jaa the next martial arts action hero, following in the footsteps of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li. It’s going to take a much better vehicle than this silly, repetitive, unimaginative film for the Thai warrior to make a name for himself. Jaa stars as Ting, a young country villager who has learned the contemplative ways of Muay Thai from his master, Pra Cru (Woranard Tantipidok), a Buddhist who once killed a man during a rope fight. When bad boy Don (Wannakit Siriput) steals the head of Ong Bak, the town’s deity, Ting heads to the big city of Bangkok to get it back, hoping he won’t have to use his massive physical skills. There the quiet fish out of water meets George (Thai comic Petchthai Wongkamlao), a former villager who has changed his name and hangs out with minor-league gangsters and gamblers in his quest to make lots of dough. In order for Ting to get close to those who have Ong Bak, George brings him to a fight-club-like dungeon where Ting must either battle ridiculously overwrought cartoon-like characters or return to his village with just his tail between his legs. Ong-Bak has a good heart and means well, which makes it more difficult to point out how intrinsically inane it is, amateurish, barely at the level of the worst of Jackie Chan, sort of a Karate Kid 7 meets Gymkata 3 by way of Don “the Dragon” Wilson’s Bloodfist XII. There was a lot of hoopla back in 2003 surrounding Jaa because all of his stunts in the film are genuine — there are no wires, CG special effects, or trick camera angles. While that does make for some fun individual scenes, it does not hold up in a lame story that lasts a very long hundred minutes. Director Prachya Pinkaew did a lot better with his 2008 martial arts movie, Chocolate, starring the awesome Yanin “Jeeja” Vismistananda. Ong-Bak is screening August 31 at 4:30 & 9:30 at BAM, concluding the “10 Years of Magnolia Pictures” series, which also included Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson, Tanya Hamilton’s Night Catches Us, James Gray’s Two Lovers, and other cool flicks from the great indie house.