Tag Archives: Kathryn Hunter

THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE’S ANNUAL SPRING GALA

Who: Harry Lennix, Arin Arbus, Anne Bogart, Bill Camp, Will Eno, Simon Godwin, Kathryn Hunter, Taibi Magar, John Douglas Thompson, Awoye Timpo, more
What: Theatre for a New Audience annual spring gala
Where: TFANA online
When: Monday, June 7, free with RSVP, VIP reception 6:30, streaming program 7:30
Why: Theatre for a New Audience was founded by Jeffrey Horowitz in 1979, but it was the company’s 2013 move to its new home in Fort Greene, the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, that rocketed it to a new level. On June 7, TFANA’s annual spring gala will be held live online, celebrating Shakespeare’s birthday; the Bard turned 457 in April. “We are celebrating Shakespeare’s birthday 457 years on because Shakespeare is, of course, never over,” Horowitz said in a statement. “A production of Hamlet ends, but the play doesn’t. Shakespeare’s work keeps getting reinvented. Last year, like so many other plans, our annual spring gala was canceled due to the pandemic. For a while, it was a question: Should we postpone again? But gathering as a TFANA community, even remotely, seemed more important than ever this year — to take stock of what we’ve been through, lost, and accomplished, and to look ahead to the future.”

Among the participants will be such actors, writers, and directors as Arin Arbus, Anne Bogart, Bill Camp, Will Eno, Simon Godwin, Kathryn Hunter, Taibi Magar, John Douglas Thompson, and Awoye Timpo; New York City public teacher Marie Maignan will receive the Samuel H. Scripps Award for Extraordinary Artistic Achievement from US representative Jahana Hayes (D-CT), and Amanda Riegel and the Thompson Family Foundation will be presented with the Life in Art Award. The evening will be emceed by actor and TFANA board member Harry Lennix; the VIP preshow begins at 6:30, followed at 7:30 by the gala. There is also a silent auction that features such items as golf and wine vacations, opera and theater tickets, jewelry, art, pet portraits, and more.

THEATER OF WAR: THE OEDIPUS PROJECT UK

Who: Kathryn Hunter, Damian Lewis, Clarke Peters, Lesley Sharp, Jason Isaacs, Nyasha Hatendi, Brian F. O’Byrne, Nick Holder, Bryan Doerries
What: Live Zoom theatrical production and discussion from Theater of War
Where: Zoom link sent with advance registration
When: Thursday, September 3, free with RSVP, 2:00
Why: One of the best Zoom presentations of the pandemic has been Theater of War’s The Oedipus Project, in which Frances McDormand, John Turturro, Oscar Isaac, Jeffrey Wright, Frankie Faison, David Strathairn, Glenn Davis, Marjolaine Goldsmith, and Jumaane Williams gave a live, powerful dramatic reading of scenes from Sophocles’s fifth-century BCE classic, Oedipus the King, from wherever they were sheltering in place. (Isaac delivered an unforgettable finale as the tortured king.) The event was introduced by Theater of War cofounder and adapter/director Bryan Doerries, who also led a postshow discussion relating the play to the Covid-19 crisis.

The organization now heads virtually across the pond for an all-star UK edition of The Oedipus Project, featuring Kathryn Hunter, Damian Lewis, Clarke Peters, Lesley Sharp, Jason Isaacs, Nyasha Hatendi, Brian F. O’Byrne, and Nick Holder. The production will take place September 3 at 2:00 and will also conclude with a discussion facilitated by Doerries with four community panelists, focusing on the subjects of aging, dementia, elder care, and family dynamics, examining the play — which Shakespeare wrote, perhaps while self-isolating, during the 1606 plague, when theaters had shut down — in context with the current pandemic.

TIMON OF ATHENS

Timon (Kathryn Hunter) throws a feast fit for a queen in Timon of Athens (photo by Henry Grossman)

Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 9, $90-$115
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org

New York-born British actress Kathryn Hunter glitters and glows in William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton’s Timon of Athens, which opened tonight at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Fort Greene. Simon Godwin’s production, initiated at the Royal Shakespeare Company and presented here in association with DC’s Shakespeare Theatre Company, should become the gold standard for the rarely performed play, a penetrating and very funny evisceration of greed and true friendship centered around a lust for jewels above all things. The text has been edited by Emily Burns and Godwin to make the lead character female, and TFANA regular Hunter runs with it, delivering an unforgettable, voracious performance as Timon (rhymes with Simon), a widowed noblewoman who loves to host feasts in her mansion where guests bring her trinkets and flatter her to no end and she gives them piles of cash and valuable gems. Painter (Zachary Fine) gives her an absurd portrait, Poet (Yonatan Gebeyehu) heaps words of praise on her, and Jeweller (Julia Ogilvie) offers her a fine stone, and she recompenses them manyfold. Sempronius (Daniel Pearce) insists that Timon not allow one of her servants, Lucilius (Adam Langdon), to marry his daughter despite their being in love, but he changes his mind quickly when she promises him money as a kind of dowry/bribe.

Her loyal steward, Flavius (John Rothman), notifies her that her wealth is dwindling, and the cynical philosopher, Apemantus (Arnie Burton), warns her not to put her faith in these false friends, but she is too caught up in the revelry to pay attention. “I wonder men dare trust themselves with men, / Methinks they should invite them without knives — / Good for their meat and safer for their lives,” Apemantus, the only character not wearing shimmering black or gold but instead a Patti Smith T-shirt, tells the audience. A few moments later, after Timon asks him to be silent, he says, “So. / Thou wilt not hear me now; thou shalt not then. / I’ll lock thy heaven from thee. / O, that men’s ears should be / To counsel deaf, but not to flattery!” When she finally understands that her coffers are empty, she sends out Flaminia, Lucilius, and Flavius to Lucullus (Dave Quay), Sempronius, and Lucia (Shirine Babb), asking for loans, but the trio is cruelly denied. Furious at this drastic change of events, the formerly happy-go-lucky Timon turns her back on the life she so treasured and shared with others. “Nothing I’ll bear from thee / But nakedness, thou detestable town,” she says of Athens. “Take thou that too, with multiplying bans. / Timon will to the woods, where she shall find / Th’unkindest beast more kinder than mankind. / The gods confound — hear me, you good gods all! — / The citizens both within and out that wall, / And grant as Timon grows her hate may grow / To the whole race of mankind, high and low! / Amen.” In the second act, Timon, now in tattered rags, is a bitter woman who spends most of her days digging her own grave until she is discovered by visitors from her past, including Alcibiades (Elia Monte-Brown), who has become the leader of an angry mob protesting the Athenian government.

Timon of Athens is regendered in Simon Godwin’s glittering production at TFANA (photo by Henry Grossman)

Godwin’s sublime and timely interpretation of Timon of Athens addresses homelessness, income inequality, the dispossessed, an unsympathetic state, and humankind’s propensity for greed. Timon is a complex character, both antihero and cautionary figure of what can happen if wealth is all that matters and friends are available for purchase. I would say that Hunter is a revelation in the title role, but she’s been a revelation in almost everything I’ve seen her in, from Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne’s The Valley of Astonishment and Fragments to Hideki Nota’s The Bee and Colin Teevan’s The Emperor. Here she displays a ruggedly coarse physicality that is utterly majestic and downright enthralling, a force of nature unto itself, whether she’s being lifted by her sycophantic, hypocritical guests or carving her own epitaph. The glorious costumes, which range from ostentatious dresses to sleek black suits and, eventually, sackcloth and ashes, are by Soutra Gilmour, who also designed the impressive sets; the stage juts out far into the audience, who sit on three sides, with ramps leading off through two corners.

In the first act, opulence is on view, with a festive table, a large gold backdrop that serves as a doorway, and, later, a rug that apparently needs to be fastened more securely to the floor, as several actors tripped over different parts the night I went. The transformation to a forest for the second act is so dramatic you might want to stay in your seats and watch it instead of hurrying out for the restroom or a drink. At rear left, guitarist and bouzuki player Christopher Biesterfeldt, percussionist Philip Coiro, clarinetist Joshua Johnson, and singer Kristen Misthopoulos perform music by composer Michael Bruce, including one piece based on a Cretan peasant hymn and another from Shakespeare’s fifty-third sonnet. Monte-Brown and Rothman stand out in a strong cast, but it’s Hunter, who has previously portrayed King Lear, Richard III, and Cyrano, who will take your breath away while also making you wonder why you’ve never read or seen this play before.

CROSSING THE LINE: WHY?

Kathryn Hunter in Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne's play 'Why?' at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris, June 2019 Pascal Gely

Kathryn Hunter wonders why in Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne production about theater itself (photo by Pascal Gely)

Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Through October 6, $85-$120
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org
crossingthelinefestival.org

The basic three-letter question “Why?” can be a repeated response, over and over again, from a curious child learning about the world, a deeply philosophical inquiry into human nature, or a painful cry when tragedy occurs. In Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne’s Why?, continuing at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center through October 6, it relates to two queries, general and specific: Why do we make and attend theater, and why did Josef Stalin have theater innovator Vsevolod Meyerhold and his actress wife, Zinaida Reich, brutally killed?

Part of FIAF’s multidisciplinary Crossing the Line Festival, Why? is also the centerpiece of “Peter Brook\NY,” a two-week, two-borough tribute to the ninety-four-year-old theater and film director — he actually prefers being called a “distiller” — an Emmy and two-time Tony winner who has written such books as The Open Door: Thoughts on Acting and Theatre, Tip of the Tongue: Reflections on Language and Meaning, and The Shifting Point: Theatre, Film, Opera 1946-1987 and has directed such plays as Hamlet with Paul Scofield, The Visit with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Marat/Sade, and more recently The Suit, The Prisoner, and The Valley of Astonishment. He is a fixture at TFANA, which is around the corner from the BAM Harvey Theater, which he helped renovate in 1987 for his epic version of The Mahabharata. He and Estienne have been collaborating for more than forty decades, and they know theater.

Marcello Magni gets serious after clowning around in Why? (photo by Pascal Gely)

The first half cheerfully explores why there is theater at all, how it came to be, and what can make it so special. The show begins with Hayley Carmichael, Kathryn Hunter, and Marcello Magni, all dressed in black, giving a kind of master class in acting. Highlights include a clownish Magni running around in circles and Hunter wondering how to make the line “My Lord, the carriage awaits” not boring. They interact with the audience, even bringing a few people onstage for some clever improv, and clearly are in love with their chosen profession, just as we are in love with watching them. There’s lots of laughter, accompanied by Laurie Blundell on piano. Theater appears to be a friendly, safe space for everyone.

But in the second act, the trio, still wearing the same costumes, moving about on the same, mostly empty stage (Brook is known for his spare sets, as evidenced by his seminal book The Empty Space — A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate), the trio becomes far more serious, reading letters, news reports, and other documents relating what happened to Stanislavski protégé Meyerhold and Reich when they supported the communist revolution instead of Stalin, who dealt with them in violent, theatrical ways. The harsh tale also involves actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. “Theater is a dangerous weapon,” Meyerhold famously wrote in the 1920s. Nearly a century later, it still is; it may be able to entertain, educate, and enlighten us, but it is also seen by far too many as a threat, which Brook and Estienne point out in their inimitable, inestimable way.

THE EMPEROR

Kathryn Hunter gives a tour-de-force performances as multiple characters in The Emperor (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 30, $90-$115
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org

The inestimable Kathryn Hunter is extraordinary as eleven characters subservient to Haile Selassie in the U.S. premiere of The Emperor, which opened tonight at Theatre for a New Audience, where it continues through September 30. The seventy-minute play was adapted by Colin Teevan from Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński’s 1978 book, which detailed the fall of the Ethiopian emperor as witnessed by those around him. The hoarse-throated Hunter portrays such figures as L.M., the emperor’s valet de chamber; F., the wiper of the emperor’s lapdog’s urine; Y.M., the keeper of the emperor’s private zoo; G.S.-D., the emperor’s pillow bearer; and Z.S.-K., the emperor’s minister of information. For each character, Hunter takes a different position onstage, uses a different voice and movement style, and makes small costume and prop changes, adding a hat, a cane, or epaulettes. Onstage with her is Ethiopian musician Temesgen Zeleke, who plays the krar, a multi-stringed bowl-shaped lyre, as well as taking a few parts himself: a rebel general and two students, one the son of G.S.-D. “Only memories / That is all that remains,” L.M. says. The subjects, who were all interviewed by Kapuściński, discuss how Selassie, who ruled Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974, slept, met with spies, fed the animals in his zoo, dealt with men he considered traitors, and prayed: “Lord save me from those who crawling on their knees, / Hide the knife that they would stick into my back.” T.K.B., the emperor’s chauffeur, recalls how he would drive Selassie in a Rolls, Lincoln, or Mercedes to the palace gate, where poor people would be seeking help, along with “dignitaries and officials, / Each burning with one desire; / To be noticed.”

Ethiopian musician Temesgen Zeleke takes on a few roles in TFANA production (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

Together the brief monologues form a telling look at what life under the “King of Kings” and “Elect of God” was like for the general populace, his cabinet, and his numerous subordinates, who handled even his most bizarre and absurd proclivities with respect in order to protect their job — and their life. Ministry of the Pen recording clerk T.L. explains, “Everyone waited to see / What the Emperor would do next, / Everyone was ashamed of letting / This conspiracy occur. Everyone was fearful of His Majesty’s wrath.” Kapuściński found similarities between Selassie and the corruption occurring in his native Poland; forty years later, comparisons can be made to so many other autocrats and despots — including President Trump, who has shown a fondness for several dictators. After describing how Selassie was able to turn perception around following a peasant revolt, Z.S.-K. declares, “That is the art of governing!” But Selassie started losing control after Jonathan Dimbleby’s documentary, Ethiopia: The Unknown Famine, was seen around the world, revealing how the emperor was really taking care of his people, even as Z.S.-K. defended his boss.

A key character can’t bear to see what happens next in The Emperor (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

A joint presentation of Young Vic, HOME, and Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, The Emperor is directed by Walter Meierjohann, who previously collaborated with Hunter and Teevan on Young Vic’s Kafka’s Monkey. The play works well when Hunter is moving about Ti Green’s spare stage (Green also designed the costumes), expertly lit by Mike Gunning, and Zeleke sits in the corner, playing and singing. But when he gets up and interacts with Hunter, the pacing grows awkward; perhaps part of the problem is that we are so focused on Hunter (Fragments, The Valley of Astonishment) that we don’t want her dazzling performance to be interrupted for any reason, whether she’s just talking, doing calisthenics, or diving across the floor with a royal pillow. It’s even a treat to watch the way she runs offstage at the end of the show. But the message about power, corruption, and dictatorships still comes across loud and clear, especially at a time in America when an administration appears to be at war with itself and many citizens believe the emperor has no clothes.

THE VALLEY OF ASTONISHMENT

Jared McNeill and Kathryn Hunter explore rather unusual properties of the human brain in THE VALLEY OF ASTONISHMENT (photo by Pascal Victor / ArtComArt)

Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 5, $60-$75
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org

The Valley of Astonishment, a fascinating, often thoroughly entrancing tale that delves into the magical mysteries of the human brain, comes from the endlessly creative minds of Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne and their C.I.C.T. / Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord company. The spare, eighty-minute production, running at Theatre for a New Audience through October 5, evokes elements of their previous works The Conference of the Birds, based on the twelfth-century poem by Farid ud-Din Attar, and The Man Who, inspired by Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, while going to new, exciting places. The great Kathryn Hunter (Brook and Estienne’s Fragments, The Bee) plays Samy Costas, a character inspired by the real-life Russian mnemonist Solomon Shereshevsky; Samy is a rather ordinary woman except that she has an extraordinary memory, able to recall everything that anyone has ever said to her through synesthesia, a process in which she associates words with images. Theatre de Complicité cofounding member Marcello Magni (Fragments with Hunter, The Birds directed by Hunter) portrays one of the scientists who studies Samy; a man with no proprioception who has to use his brain a special way in order to move his otherwise paralyzed body; and a one-armed magician inspired by René Lavand. And Jared McNeill (Brook and Estienne’s The Suit, Life of Galileo) plays a second scientist; a music-hall impresario; and a painter who sees colors when he listens to jazz. The live score is performed by composer and pianist Raphaël Chambouvet and Toshi Tsuchitori on strings and percussion; each man also takes his turn at center stage.

Kathryn Hunter is once again astonishing in Peter Brook / Marie-Hélène Estienne production (photo by Pascal Victor / ArtComArt)

The scenes that explore the blessing/curse of synesthesia are dazzling; Hunter is delightfully mesmerizing, Magni is superb as the man relearning how to walk, and McNeill excels as he imagines painting a canvas on the floor, with the help of lighting designer Philippe Vialatte. (The set includes several unpainted chairs, a rolling desk, and a coatrack, with the musicians off to one side.) One of the scientists refers to Samy’s ability as “tricks,” and soon Brook and Estienne (Je suis un Phénomène, Woza Albert!) give the show over to the one-armed magician, who performs card tricks for some of the other characters as well as a pair of audience members pulled onstage. While the tricks are cool, the scene goes on far too long and appears relevant only in its final moment, by which time the narrative thread has nearly been lost. However, it does come together for a moving finale, especially as Samy grapples with the possibility that her unique powers might be reaching an end. The Valley of Astonishment is, at times, indeed astonishing, an intelligent yet playful exploration of some of the wondrous capabilities of the human brain and how supposed experts react to them, turning them into sideshow attractions rather than using them for a greater purpose. In conjunction with the show, TFANA is hosting “Celebrating Peter Brook,” a two-day film series honoring the eighty-nine-year-old writer, director, and author, consisting of screenings of son Simon Brook’s 2012 documentary Peter Brook: The Tightrope (followed by a Q&A with Simon) and 2002 doc Brook by Brook on September 29 and Peter’s 1968 film Tell Me Lies (introduced by Simon) on September 30.

FRAGMENTS

Marcello Magni deals with a disappointing existence in ACT WITHOUT WORDS II, one of five short Beckett plays that make up FRAGMENTS at BAC

Baryshnikov Arts Center, Jerome Robbins Theater
450 West 37th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 5, $75
866-811-4111
www.bacnyc.org
www.bouffesdunord.com

If you missed C.I.C.T. / Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord’s widely praised production of Fragments at the Baryshnikov Arts Center back in fall 2011, you have another chance, as the show has returned for a splendid encore run through May 5. The Theatre for a New Audience presentation is directed by theater masters Peter Brook and Marie Hélène Estienne, whose entertaining version of The Suit ran at BAM this past winter. Fragments consists of five extremely short minimalist plays by Samuel Beckett, each one an existential gem in its own right. Totaling a mere fifty minutes, they flow into one another effortlessly as they examine loneliness and despair with a wicked sense of humor. In Rough for Theatre I (1979), original Complicité members Marcello Magni and Jos Houben play a pair of destitute souls, the former a blind and rather bad violinist, the latter a one-legged man who pushes himself about on a box and believes that maybe, if they team up, they can make more money, but their prospects don’t look good. In Rockaby (1981), Kathryn Hunter, who was so outstanding in Hideki Noda’s experimental The Bee at Japan Society last year, is dazzling as a woman citing initially repetitive nonsensical text that soon begins to take shape as she contemplates the death of her mother and her own impending demise, the words coming together in a virtuosic display of poetic grandeur.

In Act without Words II (1956), Houben and Magni play two men who live in large white sacks and are individually awakened by a goad that comes down from above; in turn, each man puts on the same suit, socks, hat, and shoes, but while Houben does it with a kick in his step, Magni is disappointed in the world, releasing a series of hysterical sighs as nothing goes his way. Hunter, in fine, deep, gravelly voice, returns for the solo Neither, originally an operatic collaboration between Beckett and Morton Feldman that begins, “to and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow / from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither.” Come and Go (1965) concludes the evening, with Houben, Hunter, and Magni wearing fabulous dresses as they gather on a park bench; one by one, they walk away for a moment, giving the other two the opportunity to gossip about her until all three have been the target of playful maliciousness. Fragments is a delightful collection of absurdist pieces that combine to form a wonderful whole. “When [Beckett] discovered theater,” Brook writes in a program note, “it became a possibility to strive for unity, a unity in which sound, movement, rhythm, breath, and silence all come together in a single rightness.” Such a unity of rightness can be found in this stellar production.