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MEDEA

Real-life partners Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale star in Simon Stone’s sizzling Medea at BAM (photo by Richard Termine)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. at Ashland Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 8, $45-$195
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/medea

As you enter BAM’s elegantly shabby chic Harvey Theater to see Simon Stone’s Medea, there are two young boys already onstage, one stretched out on the floor, on his laptop, the other leaning against a wall, on his smartphone. Bob Cousins’s dramatic cyclorama set is blindingly white, evoking a heavenly way station, making it look as if the unconcerned brothers are floating in a mysterious void. In this riveting adaptation, inspired by Euripides’s 431 BC original and the true story of Dr. Debora Green, who committed horrific crimes against her family in Kansas in 1995, Stone instantly puts us in the kids’ shoes. It’s a thrillingly uncomfortable moment since, of course, this is Medea, and we know it will not end well for the siblings. And getting there is indeed heart-wrenching.

Contemporary stand-ins for Jason and Medea, Lucas (Bobby Cannavale) and Anna (Rose Byrne) are married pharmaceutical scientists facing a crisis. Anna has just been released from a psychiatric facility after having done something bad to Lucas, who is in a relationship with a woman half his age, Clara (Madeline Weinstein), the daughter of their boss, Christopher (Dylan Baker). Anna plans to simply walk back into their old life with their two sons, Edgar (Gabriel Amoroso or Jolly Swag) and (Gus Emeka or Orson Hong Guindo), but Lucas has other ideas. “I know your trust will be hard to regain. What I did to you,” Anna says. “We don’t need to talk about it now,” Lucas replies. Anna: “No, I want to. It was a breach of trust. Most importantly it was trust that we lost.” Lucas: “I’m not —” Anna: “In all those messy months we lost sight of everything we’d promised to be to each other and both of us did that but I overstepped the line —” Lucas: “We should never have stayed together this long.” A determined Anna later adds, “I’m going to win you back.” That does not go so well either.

Social worker Elsbeth (Jordan Boatman) does not have the easiest of jobs monitoring Anna (Rose Byrne) and her two young sons (photo by Richard Termine)

Medea is ripe for reinterpretation, particularly in a world rife with misogyny and violence. In the past ten years I have seen Aaron Mark’s Another Medea, Limb Hyoung-taek’s Medea and Its Double, and Luis Alfaro’s Mojada, all of which took the central story and reimagined it in unique and compelling ways. Born in Basel and raised in England and Australia, Stone, who moves all around the globe, rarely settling down for an extended period of time, has previously adapted such classics as The Wild Duck, Miss Julie, John Gabriel Borkman, Peer Gynt, Three Sisters, and Hamlet and dazzled New York audiences with his sizzling Yerma at Park Avenue Armory in 2018, infusing his work with personal experience, as he does again with Medea.

The set features one large rectangular white wall that occasionally rises to serve as a projection screen, showing either extreme close-ups of the action, primarily a spellbinding Byrne, her evocative eyes searching for meaning, or live-stream shots by Edgar, who is making an autobiographical film for school. (The video design is by Julia Frey, with bright lighting by Sarah Johnston.) The play was originally performed at live-streaming master and BAM fixture Ivo van Hove’s Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (formerly Toneelgroep Amsterdam); the video footage can get to be a bit too much, so it’s a relief when the device goes away in the latter parts of the eighty-minute production, when things really heat up.

The cast is all new for this US premiere, with solid support led by Tony and Emmy nominee Baker (La Bête, Happiness, The Americans) and Weinstein (The Real Thing, Mary Page Marlowe) in addition to Victor Almanzar as bookstore owner Herbert, who offers Anna a job, and Jordan Boatman as Elsbeth, the social worker in charge of her case, keeping a close watch on her treatment of Gus and Edgar. At one point Stone makes a tongue-in-cheek reference to the finale of The Sopranos that is a wry riff on what ultimately happens in his take on Medea, as two famous families meet their fate.

Anna (Rose Byrne) is none too happy that her husband, Lucas (Bobby Cannavale), is now with Clara (Madeline Weinstein) in contemporary update of Medea (photo by Richard Termine)

Byrne (Bridesmaids, You Can’t Take It with You) plays Anna with a strong-willed vulnerability; she is no mere woman scorned, seeking revenge, but an intelligent wife, mother, and scientist who had the deck stacked against her and refuses to sit back and let everyone walk over her. She has a fiery, passionate chemistry with Cannavale (The Hairy Ape, The Lifespan of a Fact), who also displays a strong-willed vulnerability, allowing the cracks in Lucas’s armor to show through. “She created this instability,” Clara argues to Lucas. “I did too,” he readily admits. This is a Medea that could only be created in today’s #MeToo sociopolitical climate.

The Australian Byrne and New Jersey native Cannavale are real-life partners with two young boys of their own; after going through hell onstage, they head back to their nearby Gowanus apartment to be with their kids. Byrne and Cannavale work together often on television and in film, but this is the first time they are acting opposite each other onstage; later this year they will portray another married couple in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge for the Sydney Theatre Company. At the start of Medea, Anna shows Lucas a painting she made while at the asylum, depicting Noah’s ship in a storm, in which all the animals are drowning. “They thought they were safe and then another storm whipped up and capsized the ark,” Anna tells a confused Lucas. She continues, “You see the dead dove floating on the swell over there? With the olive branch still in its mouth?” It’s a metaphor for Anna’s state of mind, but one can also think of it as a kind of peace offering between Byrne and Cannavale as they return to a normal life following the searing heartbreak their characters experience night after night.

TICKET ALERT — ST. PETERSBURG BALLET THEATRE: SWAN LAKE

St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre makes its US debut in February with Swan Lake at BAM (photo by KT)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
February 15-16, $35-$135, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
spbt.ru

Internationally acclaimed Russian prima ballerina Irina Kolesnikova and the St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre will make their US debut February 15-16 at BAM with their lush and lavish production of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Rejected by the Kirov and the Bolshoi because of her size, Kolesnikova ultimately made a home — and a family — with the St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre, eventually marrying founder Konstantin Tachkin, with whom she has two children. They’ve come a long way since he called her a “little red lump in a T-shirt” when she auditioned at the age of ten.

Not to be confused with the St Petersburg Festival Ballet or the St Petersburg State Ballet — the name issue is currently in court — the St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre has toured with such classics as The Nutcracker, Giselle, Cinderella, and The Sleeping Beauty, but their gem is Swan Lake, with two dozen swans and Kolesnikova as Odette/Odile. At BAM, they will be accompanied by the Chamber Orchestra of New York, conducted by Timur Gorkovenko. The Vaganova-trained Kolesnikova also has performed the title role in the company’s Her Name Was Carmen, its unique take on the Georges Bizet ballet based on Prosper Mérimée’s novella, with the setting moved to a refugee site, inspired by her 2016 visit to Balkan camps.

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: HAMNET

Dead Centre makes its BAM debut with Hamnet (photo by Ernesto Galan)

BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
October 30 – November 3, $25
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/hamnet
www.deadcentre.org

New BAM artistic director David Binder continues his season of BAM debuts with Hamnet, presented by Ireland’s Dead Centre. In 1585, William Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, gave birth to twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith. Hamnet died tragically in 1596 at the age of eleven; three years later, the Bard wrote perhaps his greatest play, Hamlet, at least partly about a young man haunted by the death of his father. Founded in 2012 by Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd and based between Dublin and London, Dead Centre has previously staged Beckett’s Room, Lippy, (S)quark!, Souvenir, Chekhov’s First Play, and Shakespeare’s Last Play; all but Lippy deal with writers, including James Joyce and Marcel Proust in addition to Samuel Beckett, Anton Chekhov, and Shakespeare. It has long been debated whether Shakespeare wrote Hamlet specifically in reaction to the death of his son, or whether Hamnet also inspired part of other works. For example, in King John, published in 1623, Constance says, “Grief fills the room up of my absent child.”

“Over centuries of feverish speculation, the most compelling reflections on the presence of Shakespeare’s emotional life in his plays — preeminently, James Joyce’s brilliant pages in Ulysses, but there are many others — have focused on Hamlet,” Shakespeare expert Stephen Greenblatt wrote in 2014 in the New York Review of Books. “This biographical attention to a work deriving from recycled materials and written for the public stage would seem inherently implausible, were it not for the overwhelming impression on readers and spectators alike that the play must have emerged in an unusually direct way from the playwright’s inner life, indeed that at moments the playwright was barely in control of his materials. I will attempt in what follows to trace Hamlet back to a personal experience of grief and to sketch a long-term aesthetic strategy that seems to have emerged from this experience.” The sixty-minute multimedia piece, running October 30 to November 3 at BAM Fisher, features text and direction by Moukarzel and Kidd, with dramaturgy by Michael West, set design by Andrew Clancy, costumes by Grace O’Hara, lighting by Stephen Dodd, sound by Kevin Gleeson, video by Jose Miguel Jimenez, and choreography by Liv O’Donoghue. Aran Murphy plays Hamnet, addressing the audience directly as he shares his tragic tale.

NEXT WAVE 2019

The Second Woman repeats the same scene from John Cassavetes’s Opening Night one hundred times (photo by Heidrun Lohr)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Peter Jay Sharp Building, 230 Lafayette Ave.
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space, 321 Ashland Pl.
October 15 – December 15
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Like myriad loyal BAMgoers, I look forward every year to the announcement of the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which has been presenting cutting-edge, experimental, and innovative dance, music, film, theater, opera, and hard-to-categorize multidisciplinary performances from around the world for nearly forty years. We eagerly scour the schedule to see when our longtime BAM favorites will be returning, scanning for such beloved names and companies as Robert Wilson, Sasha Waltz, Grupo Corpo, Batsheva, Philip Glass, Sankai Juku, Ivo van Hove, Mark Morris, Théâtre de la Ville, William Kentridge, Laurie Anderson, and the incomparable Pina Bausch, programmed by masterful executive producer Joe Melillo since 1999.

But this year’s lineup features nary a single familiar name, including that of Melillo, who retired after the Winter/Spring season. For his debut Next Wave Festival, new artistic director David Binder has opted to include a roster of performers all making their BAM debuts as well. But don’t be scared off by the lack of recognition. There was a time when no one in New York had ever seen Pina Bausch, Sankai Juku, Batsheva, Sasha Waltz, et al. And by its very nature, the Next Wave is all about the future of performance, delivered to an eager and intrepid audience open to anything and everything.

Dead Centre’s Hamnet tells the story of Shakespeare’s son (photo by Ernesto Galan)

“In programming my first season at BAM, I was inspired by the genesis of Next Wave and the groundbreaking work of my predecessors, Harvey Lichtenstein and Joe Melillo,” Binder said in a statement. “Next Wave is a place to see, share, and celebrate the most exciting new ideas in theater, music, dance, and, especially, the unclassifiable adventures. We’ve invited a slate of artists who have never performed at BAM. Each and every one of them is making a BAM debut, with artistic work that’s surprising and resonant. I’m excited to launch this season and to build BAM’s next chapter
with you.”

The 2019 Next Wave roster is an impressive one, kicking off October 15-20 with Michael Keegan-Dolan and Teaċ Daṁsa’s Swan Lake / Loch na hEala, about a young girl sexually assaulted by a priest. In The Second Woman, Alia Shawkat performs the same scene from John Cassavetes’s Opening Night one hundred times with one hundred different men over the course of twenty-four consecutive hours. Christiane Jatahy’s What if they went to Moscow? explores film and theater in a retelling of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters that takes place concurrently onstage at the BAM Fisher and onscreen at BAM Rose Cinemas, the audiences switching places as the performance repeats. In Dante or Die’s User Not Found, audience members sit in a café at the Greene Grape Annex on Fulton St., following the exploits of a man a few tables away. Dimitris Papaioannou breaks boundaries as he explores human existence in The Great Tamer. And Glenn Kaino’s When a Pot Finds Its Purpose will be the inaugural free exhibition at the new Rudin Family Gallery at BAM Strong.

Dante or Die’s User Not Found takes place in the Greene Grape Annex on Fulton St. (photo by Justin Jones)

The 2019 Next Wave Festival also includes Bruno Beltrão/Grupo de Rua’s Inoah, Dumbworld’s free outdoor art piece He Did What?, Selina Thompson’s free interactive installation Race Cards, Dead Centre’s Hamnet, Marlene Monteiro Freitas’s Bacchae: Prelude to a Purge, Untitled Projects/Unicorn Theatre, UK’s The End of Eddy, Peeping Tom’s 32 rue Vandenbranden, Fuel/National Theatre/Leeds Playhouse’s Barber Shop Chronicles, Kyle Marshall Choreography’s A.D. & Colored, Kate McIntosh’s In Many Hands, and Meow Meow’s A Very Meow Meow Holiday Show. Still worried about unfamiliarity? If you’ve been to BAM before, you should be ready, willing, and able to be surprised, and if you’ve never been to BAM, you should be preparing to make your debut.

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: THE BACCHAE

Anne Bogart and SITI Company relate Euripides’ The Bacchae to today’s sociopolitical ills in new interpretation (photo by Craig Schwartz)

THE BACCHAE
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. at Ashland Pl.
October 3-7, $40-$75
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Anne Bogart and SITI Company return to BAM’s Next Wave Festival with their new interpretation of Euripides’ classic tale of gods and mortals, religion and the state, the earthly and the divine, The Bacchae. “More than any other play in Western civilization, Euripides’ is probably the one that most directly addresses the art of theater,” Bogart explains in a program note. “We are aware, for example, that we are looking at an actor or at a precisely lit staging and scenery, but at the same time we allow ourselves to enter into another world that is merely suggested by what is actually present.” The work, which premiered at the Getty Villa in California last month, is translated by Aaron Poochigian, with set and lighting by Brian H Scott, sound by Darron L West, and music composed by Erik Sanko. The cast features Ellen Lauren as Dionysus, Barney O’Hanlon as Tiresias, Stephen Duff Webber as Cadmus, Eric Berryman as Pentheus, and Akiko Aizawa as Agave. In conjunction with the show, the talk “Speaking Truth to Power: On Fear and Governance” will take place October 5 at the BAM Fisher’s Hillman Studio ($15, 6:00), with Anne Bogart and Monica Youn in conversation with Corey Robin, and BAM and the Mark Morris Dance Group are teaming up for “Introduction to Suzuki & Viewpoints,” a master class with SITI, on October 10 ($25, 12 noon) for theater artists, actors, dancers, performers, and directors.

LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT

Sir Richard Eyre’s intimate staging of Eugene O’Neill classic continues at BAM through May 27 (photo by Richard Termine)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St.
through May 27, $25-$150, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

The walls are closing in on the Tyrone family and there’s not much anyone can do about it in Sir Richard Eyre’s deeply intimate staging of Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night, a work so personal that O’Neill never wanted it to be performed. Eyre initially brought the show to the Bristol Old Vic as part of the venerable institution’s 250th anniversary in 2016, with Oscar, Emmy, and Tony winner Jeremy Irons as James Tyrone and Olivier winner and Oscar nominee Lesley Manville as his wife, Mary; the Bristol was where Eyre saw his first play and where Irons trained. A stunning, slightly amended production is now running at the BAM Harvey through May 27 before heading out to California. Rob Howell’s set is staggeringly breathtaking, a large living room with sharply angled glass walls and ceilings that seem to both threaten and expose James and Mary as well as their sons, the sickly Edmund (Matthew Beard) and the ne’er-do-well Jamie (Rory Keenan), along with the maid, Cathleen (Jessica Regan). James is a famous actor who, emotionally crippled by childhood poverty, chose the easy way out, a financially successful career touring his big hit, The Count of Monte Cristo, rather than pursuing artistic challenges. Despite his money, he remains fearful and miserly, and his family has been scarred by it. While James, Jamie, and Edmund drink heartily, Mary is addicted to painkillers, claiming they are for the rheumatism that is crippling her hands. She has recently returned from yet another stay in a sanitarium, and the men are keeping a close eye on her, particularly when she goes upstairs and spends time in the extra bedroom, where she loses herself in her morphine-addled world. James desperately wants to keep the truth about Edmund’s illness from Mary, but he no longer has the tight grip on his family that he might have once had.

James Tyrone (Jeremy Irons) and Mary (Lesley Manville) fight many demons in Long Day’s Journey into Night (photo by Richard Termine)

It all takes place on a foggy August day in 1912, but the show feels as relevant as ever, given the current opioid crisis that is devastating America, and O’Neill’s knowing depiction of functional alcoholism is as sharp as ever. Former National Theatre director Eyre (Ghosts at BAM, The Crucible on Broadway) focuses on conversations between two characters, making it feel like we are invading their privacy, intruding on this dysfunctional family, whether we’re watching a sweet, romantic moment between James and Mary, a warm bonding between James and Edmund, or a lovely little talk between Mary and Cathleen. The cast is exceptional, led by a brilliant performance by Manville (The Phantom Thread, Ghosts); she plays Mary with more of a firm grounding than usual, as if Mary has a legitimate fighting chance to beat her addiction. (Previous portrayers of Mary include Tony winners Florence Eldridge, Vanessa Redgrave, and Jessica Lange as well as Geraldine Fitzgerald, Zoe Caldwell, Bibi Andersson, Laurie Metcalf, Liv Ullmann, and Colleen Dewhurst.) In one scene she starts to go upstairs several times but turns back, which tortures her husband and sons and teases the audience, even though we know where she will eventually end up. Irons (Reversal of Fortune, The Real Thing) is classy and erudite as James, his long legs spread apart magnificently when he’s smoking his cigar and reading the paper at the table; he looks at Mary with real tenderness, recalling a love he might never recapture. (The role has earned Tonys for Fredric March and Brian Dennehy and nominations for Jack Lemmon and Gabriel Byrne; other portrayers include Laurence Olivier, James Cromwell, Robert Ryan, Alfred Molina, and David Suchet.)

The Tyrone family can’t look away from their troubled existence in Bristol Old Vic production at BAM (photo by Richard Termine)

Tony nominee Beard (Skylight, And When Did You Last See Your Father?) has an amiability not always associated with Edmund, while Keenan (Liola, The Kitchen) is brash and determined as Jamie, who has given up on any kind of reputable future. Regan (Doctors, Liola) makes the most of the small but important role of Cathleen. Peter Mumford’s lighting often results in characters’ being reflected in the windows, like ghostly apparitions of their troubled souls. As dark as the play is, Eyre holds out just enough hope that this time things will turn around for the Tyrones, that maybe Jamie will get a real job, Edmund will beat consumption, Mary will kick morphine, and James will go back to the stage. But as Mary says, “None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.” Written seventy-five years ago, O’Neill’s words still ring true, providing yet more sparks to this American classic.

KING LEAR

Kent (Antony Byrne) is at the ready as Lear (Sir Antony Sher) enters in Royal Shakespeare production at BAM (photo by Richard Termine)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St.
April 7-29, $35-$125, 7:30 (plus weekend matinees)
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Sir Antony Sher bids adieu to Shakespeare in a dark version of the already dark King Lear, continuing at BAM’s Harvey Theater through April 27. The Royal Shakespeare Company production takes place in a dank, dreary, dismal world reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa’s The Lower Depths, where poverty and disillusionment reign. As the audience enters the theater, robed and hooded figures slowly walk onstage from the wings and sit on a vinyl tarp covering the ground, which is strewn with black gravel, while hellish mist floats in. After several minutes, they leave and a door in the back wall opens; Lear, wearing an enormous, brutal, bearlike fur coat, makes his entrance, sitting on his throne atop a large box with transparent sides. The members of the court are all dressed in black, some with gold adornments, except for one woman, who we soon learn is Cordelia (Mimi Ndiweni). Prepared to divide his kingdom into thirds, Lear listens as first Goneril (Nia Gwynne), who is married to the Duke of Albany (Clarence Smith), then Regan (Kelly Williams), wed to the Duke of Cornwall (James Clyde), profess their undying love for their father, and each is rewarded with their share of the kingdom. But when Cordelia, the youngest daughter, tells Lear she loves him as a child should love a parent, refusing to damn him with faint praise, he disinherits her. Lear’s trusted friend and adviser, the Earl of Kent (Antony Byrne), questions the king’s decision, so he is exiled. Afterward, another of Lear’s advisers, the Earl of Gloucester (David Troughton), is tricked by his illegitimate son, Edmund (Paapa Essiedu), into believing that his older son, Edgar (Oliver Johnstone), has plotted against him, leading Edgar to run away and disguise himself as Poor Tom, a crazy wanderer. Things don’t go well from there for anyone in the play, which was inspired by Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland and Sir Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music has been presenting Lear for more than 150 years, with a wide range of actors portraying the king, from Ernesto Rossi and Edwin Booth to Frank Langella and Sir Derek Jacobi. “It’s all Ian McKellen’s fault,” Sher writes at the beginning of his latest book, Year of the King: The Lear Diaries; McKellen played Lear at BAM in 2007. Directed by RSC artistic director Gregory Doran, Sher’s longtime partner, this Lear is more subtle than most, if that word can be used at all to describe the Bard’s monumental tragedy. The sixty-eight-year-old Sher plays Lear as a sad, gentle, at times spoiled child who is already in decline before completely unraveling. With great understatement he towers over everyone in the storm scene, high atop the box, video of a rushing waterfall raging behind him, but he has already lost it all. Byrne is a fine, forceful Kent, boasting a shaved head with a warriorlike tattoo; he’s determined to bring the king back to reality, but he knows it’s too late. Troughton is magnificent as Gloucester, a pathetic figure on his way to certain doom, his hair so disheveled you want to go onstage and hug him (and comb his dreary locks). Johnstone’s Edgar is heartbreaking as well, a kind of sprite who has been beaten down by a cruel world he can’t understand. And Graham Turner is a memorable Fool, a tall, strong clown whose mind and body break down over time.

Kent (Antony Byrne) attends to a failing Lear (Sir Antony Sher) as the Fool (Graham Turner) looks on (photo by Richard Termine)

Niki Turner’s set is mostly spare, with various objects, from small trees to chairs and tables to large circles on poles representing the sun and the moon, carried by the cast. The large box is a curious addition that might not completely work — perhaps it’s a metaphor for peering inside the minds of the characters, particularly Lear’s, or else is a sign of being trapped — but it is eerily effective in the blinding scene, blood spurting and splashing onto the transparent sides. Doran focuses on the act of seeing throughout the play, giving prominence to lines about sight and eyes. “What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes,” Lear tells Gloucester. “’Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind,” the Fool says to the old man (Edward James Walters). Tim Mitchell’s lighting, Jonathan Ruddick’s sound design, and Ilona Sekacz’s music, performed by musicians on balconies on the right and left of the stage, combine for a threatening atmosphere; the goings-on grow so somber that a surprising amount of the audience did not return after intermission for the second act, although I’d like to think that was more because those patrons were not prepared for nearly three and a half hours of gloom and doom. But this is Lear, after all, in this case featuring one of the world’s greatest Shakespearean actors taking his final Bard bow. It might be more of a whisper than a scream, but it is majestic and monumental nonetheless.