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June 30, 2006
TT: Forgotten but fresh
Friday is here, I'm back in New York, and it's time once again for the weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I wax enthusiastic in today's paper about two new shows, Susan and God and Macbeth:The most interesting thing about playgoing in New York isn't Broadway--exciting though it can be--but the plethora of tiny Off Broadway troupes that make magic on the cheap. The Mint Theater Company, one of the best, specializes in neglected plays deserving of a second chance, which it performs in a coffin-shaped room on the third floor of a dingy office building in the theater district. The Mint's productions are always worthy and often revelatory, never more so than in the case of Rachel Crothers' "Susan and God," a long-lost Broadway smash from 1937 that wowed the critics, played to packed houses, was filmed by MGM, then sank from sight. This is its first New York revival since 1943, and it is a major event, a pitch-perfect production of a 69-year-old play whose subject matter is so modern in flavor that it could have been written last week....
I feared the worst when I opened the program to the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park production of "Macbeth" and found not one but two open letters in which Oskar Eustis, the company's artistic director, assured me that the play I was about to see was "all too appropriate a choice" for a "divided and war-torn nation" engaged in a "vaguely defined war on terror." Nor was I encouraged to learn that Moisés Kaufman, the director, was offering us a modern-dress "Macbeth" performed in a bombed-out palace strewn with rubble. It suggested a party game for precocious kids: "How many clichés can you spot?" Yet Mr. Kaufman, for all his political preoccupations, is also a true showman, and he has somehow managed to turn these week-old leftovers into a thriller full of sumptuous pageantry and drenched in buckets of stage blood....
No link. You know what to do: either (A) buy a copy of the Journal or (B) go here and follow instructions. Me, I recommend Plan B, but the Journal on paper is infinitely better than no Journal at all.
Posted June 30, 2006 12:00 PM
