PRIVATE LIVES A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE BETRAYAL
PRIVATE LIVES
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
California Shakespeare is currently performing Noel Coward's PRIVATE LIVES.
Director Mark Rucker has created a marvel: this production is nothing short of simply smashing: this show is tasteful sophisticated comedy at its finest.
You can drive your lumbering RV north to Point Barrow or south to San Isidro and you will not find a funnier, more elegant, more sophisticated comedy this side of London's West End.
Unless you are an elitist, having an affair with a theatre snob, an acolyte to the freeway culture or just want to leave a giagonzo carbon footprint, why risk your life and the climate by driving to Ashland?
Save the ice caps: drive to Orinda.
Pretense and affectation aside: Diana Lamar is simply smashing as Amanda Prynne: a woman who has the sense and confidence enough to stop pretending, abandon convention and hypocrisy, and just go for the real thing as Tom Stoppard would call say.
Miss Lamar slips into the role of leisure class decadence and cosmopolitan savoir-faire, and sips a martini like British royalty.
Stephen Barker Turner is simply smashing as Elyot Chase: a man who takes laps around the planet when his life is in turmoil and takes laps to the brandy decanter when things are going his way.
Thanks to Lynne Soffer, the dialect and text coach, Mister Turner speaks with a manicured and clipped Eaton accent: sparing beautifully with his equal: Miss Lamar; their duet convinces the audience that heated passion, mad romance and unbridled propinquity could well be the closest we get to the ideal of love.
Costuming by Katherine Roth is marvelously attentive to detail; she should be particularly commended for Mister Turner's natty apparel and Miss Lamar's chic elegance.
By contrast, Miss Roth rightly dresses Sibyl (played by Sarah Nealis) in frou-frou dowdiness and Victor (played by Jud Williford) in sartorial blandness: strongly reinforcing each of their characters with the subtlety costume.
For an evening of refinement and laughter, this show is your ticket.
Performances, in the enchanting Bruns Memorial Amphitheatre, run through August 2.
PRIVATE LIVES will transport you from the dreadful dross of the recession to the crisp, stylish elegance of Noel Coward.
For more information call the box office at 510.548.9666 or surf over to . . .
http://www.calshakes.org/v4/tickets/ .
Enjoy the show.
A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
The Off Broadway West Theatre Company is currently presenting A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE by Arthur Miller.
As the Zen practitioners are wont to say, "You can never stick your foot into the same river twice," so too is it with live theatre, "You can never see the same play twice."
While you may have seen A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE sometime between its inception in 1955 and the present, "you ain't seen nothing" as the Brooklynese would say, until you witness the stunning performance of Richard Harder as he unfurls the tragic fate of Eddie Carbone: a man accelerating in a descending spiral of madness, anger, jealousy and self-destruction.
Eddie Carbone is a longshoreman in what Arthur Miller referred to as a "polis:" a poor area of New York where all the denizens are in the same situation.
In the case of Red Hook, the "polis" is section of Brooklyn nearly under the Brooklyn Bridge; men are dock workers and women stay at home wives; the social frabric is so strong, it is woven with neither cotton nor linen but ropes and cables; and honor is enforced with vendettas and stillettos—and not the stillettos the women wear either.
To digress historically: Sicily circa 1091, was unwitting host to its liberators: the Normans: who lifted from it the Muslim yoke.
During the Norman period, Sicilians developed a tradition of clandestine local self-government and justice of the people, while beneath an alien political umbrella.
Such was the socio-political tradition, the customs and unwritten laws, imported to the "polis" i.e. Eddie Carbone's Red Hook.
Having heard the basic story of A VIEW directly from a Sicilian longshoreman, Arthur Miller fleshed it out with details, characters and psychological drama.
His lead character, Eddie Carbone, constructed a life from a dream and hard work, amid the corrupt docks of Brooklyn.
Given the challenges of life on the docks, Eddie was a hero just to provide himself and his wife Beatrice with food on the table and a roof over thier heads.
His magnaminity extends to provide his orphaned niece, Catherine, with a home and a vocational education.
Like every mortal, especially men, Eddie has feet of clay: he is conflicted.
His love for his niece has departed from the advuncular, and while he knows he cannot have Catherine, neither can he give her up to an other man.
Catherine develops an attraction to her Aunt Beatrice's cousin, Rodolpho: an illegal immigrant hiding within Eddie's home along with his older brother Marco; it is here that Eddie starts to unwravel.
This is where we see the real genius of director Peter Tripp and the acting talent of Richard Harder spring to life.
Tripp, whose stage experience goes back to 1958 at Alameda High School, trots Eddie's inner madness up to the surface.
Harder's Eddie is transparent: the audience can see the whirling agonizing gears of Eddie's convoluted jealous mind trying to achieve the impossible: brutally manipulating his family and friends in a desperate attempt to retain that which he selfishly wants to possess: Catherine: his Galatea.
Alfieri, played superbly by Randy Hurst, is ostensibly a lawyer serving the Red Hook polis; functionally speaking he is both a psychologist and family therapist to Eddie, a presaging narator to the audience and, in the classical structure of Greek tragedy, the chorus who points out the inevitability of Eddie's fate.
The conflict of Eddie's self-will in opposition to nature and to the will of the community, is apparent to Alfieri who generously describes Eddie as a "self-interested man."
Although he tries to mask his motives, Eddie's actions within the play are solely prompted by his inner desires.
As a social being, humans must act halfway to preserve the rules of the community and lives of others while somehow placating their own desires and achieving their own dreams.
Given that Eddie's desires are impossible: Eddie is forced to act without unrestraint and without inhibition.
To his credit Richard Harder rises to the force and subtlety demanded by his character: Eddie's selfishness is conspicuous to everyone but his own oblivious self; his transmission of this paradox to the audience is real stagecraft and most noteworthy.
Eddie's tragic flaw is his self-interest; it manifests itself initially as a heroic man's healthy struggle to carve out an existence along the Brooklyn waterfront: his determination is a strength and yet it becomes a flaw: it is admirable, alarming and ultimately destructive when insubordinate to nature.
A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE is a metaphor for our times, it is about letting go of what we cannot possess.
For tickets to this American classic visit the Off Broadway West website at:
http://www.offbroadwaywest.org
or call the box office at 1-800-838-3006.
BETRAYAL
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
Step into Actors Theatre of 855 Bush Street in San Francisco, and you are only two, possibly three, generations from the man himself: Constantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski: the Russian import who invented the method school of acting.
The Stanislavski technique was multi-variant, holistic and psycho-physical in its approach: it explored character and action both from inside the character and from outside the character.
Kazan and Brando expropriated the method to perform Tennessee Williams.
Circa 1947, Stanislavski passed the Russo-Thespian torch to Lee Strasberg, who, along with Stella Adler and Harold Clurman are now considered the founders of the American method style of acting.
While living in New York, Jean Shelton, unquestionably one of the finest acting teachers in the country, was closely associated with Stella Adler, Harold Clurman, and Lee Strasberg, until 1961.
Kevin Phillips and Christian Phillips are the sons of Jean Shelton and the successful Broadway director and actor: Wendell Phillips.
Harold Pinter's BETRAYAL, is currently being staged at Actors Theatre: it presently occupies the very vortex of this auspicious confluence of theatrical talent, DNA and tradition.
Keith Phillips directs BETRAYAL: painting a Pinteresque tableau or tabloid: scattering lots of character details and nuance before the grasping, vainly sleuthing audience while simultaneously plunging the audience into deeper doubt and ambiguity as to the real nature or psychological composition of Pinter's characters.
Christian Phillips is cast as Robert: a book publisher who, in a very Pinteresque way, holds his emotional cards and his true identity in close proximity to his vest.
Emma—wife to Robert—a vixen played beautifully by Linden Young, is a sensuous mystery wrapped within an erotic enigma: Emma strips the husk of commitment from the very kernel human intimacy.
Jerry—Emma's lover of seven ardent years—played by Frank Willey, is the riddle about which this play pivots.
If the play could be reduced down to a few conspicuous questions they might be: One, what does Emma extract from her illicit relationship with likes of Jerry?
And two, why does Robert keep Jerry on as a friend.
And who exactly is zooming whom?
The dynamic between Robert and Jerry is the essence Pinteresque.
As stated in the Chamber's Dictionary, Pinteresque is characterized or marked by halting dialogue, uncertainty of identity and an air of menace.
Robert, having known of Jerry and Emma's affair for five years, uses this knowledge as power in the self-absorbed competitive, face-saving one-upmanship he exercises with Jerry.
The style of the play features Pinter's characteristically economical dialogue, his characters' hidden emotions and veiled motivations, and above all their dishonesty exercised even to the extent of self-deception.
Christian Phillips is truly San Francisco's most under-rated actor: he should not be missed.
Imagine: Pinter, Phillips, Phillips and Stanislavski all on one stage.
If you can appreciate superlative theatre, then you do not want to miss this.
Contact the box office via www.actorstheatresf.org or 415-345-1287.