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September 24, 2004
TT: Words (what are they good for?)
As so often happens after Thursday, today is Friday, meaning that I'm in The Wall Street Journal with a review of two terrific off-Broadway revivals, Eugène Ionesco's The Bald Soprano at the Atlantic Theater and Basil Twist's Symphonie Fantastique at Dodger Stages:Eugène Ionesco's "The Bald Soprano," written in 1950 and now playing Off Broadway at the Atlantic Theater through Oct. 17 in a new translation by Tina Howe, is the opposite of a well-made play, so much so that Ionesco himself called it an "anti-play." Nothing much happens in "The Bald Soprano" (nothing explicable, anyway) and nobody says anything that makes sense. Yet the laughs come in carload lots right from the start, and by the time the lights come up again an hour later, you know you've been watching a show that is at once deliriously silly and darkly profound....
"Banality is a symptom of non-communication," Ionesco once remarked. "Men hide behind their clichés." That insidious process of self-concealment is brought to life in "The Bald Soprano," which he was inspired to write after he attempted to teach himself English out of a French-English phrase book. Out of its blandly stereotypical phrases he spun an anarchic fantasy about two married couples, a maid and a fireman who vainly attempt to break through the blank wall of polite convention that separates them from one another, only to find themselves trapped inside the conversation-book platitudes that they string together in long tendrils of illogic: "If you catch cold, you must wrap it up." "It's a useless precaution, but absolutely necessary."
I don't speak French, so I can't pronounce on the quality of Ms. Howe's translation, but it certainly works on stage, especially as directed by Carl Forsman and performed by an ensemble cast whose members understand that there is nothing so delightful as watching serious-looking people utter meaningless statements with absolute conviction (Jan Maxwell, one of my favorite actresses, is especially good at it)....
What you see in "Symphonie Fantastique" is one wall of a shallow glass tank into which five wet-suited puppeteers dip and slosh 180 peculiar-looking objects, none of which even remotely resembles Charlie McCarthy. Inspired by the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky and Berlioz's own program for the "Fantastic Symphony," Mr. Twist uses this equipment to conjure up a bewitching string of complex scenes that unfold with the nagging compulsion of a love story (which is what Berlioz's symphony is, more or less). The puppeteers are hidden from view by a black wall, and the tank, which looks rather like a flat-screen television, is lit so cunningly and colorfully that you soon become disoriented and surrender joyously to the illusions being created before your amazed eyes.
In the end, literal descriptions of what "happens" in "Symphonie Fantastique" must inevitably fall short of conveying its loony, inscrutable beauty....
No link. You know what to do (and yes, you can always go to the library!).
Posted September 24, 2004 1:39 AM
