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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Same as the old boss

May 31, 2013 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two major revivals in New York and Chicago, Classic Stage Company’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle and the Court Theatre’s The Misanthrope. Both are superior. Here’s an excerpt.
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Bertolt Brecht was a bad man who was also a great artist, and the play in which it is most difficult to attend exclusively to his greatness is “The Caucasian Chalk Circle.” First produced in East Berlin in 1954, “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” is a complex and mysterous fable of justice and its discontents that is prefaced by a strident prologue set on a collective farm in which Brecht, who was famously enamored of Soviet Communism, assures the audience that “the home of the Soviet people shall also be the home of Reason!” How can those who know of Stalin’s murderous proclivities bridge the gap between propaganda and parable? Should we even try?
971037_10151638236131047_1784598933_n.jpgBrian Kulick has “solved” this problem cleverly–if evasively–in Classic Stage Company’s revival of “The Caucasian Chalk Circle.” Not only has he cut the prologue, but he’s moved the action forward to 1989, immediately after the collapse of Communism. The premise of the production is that “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” is being performed by a poverty-stricken troupe of strolling players who now realize that the result of the Russian Revolution was “to make it possible for the most evil people to have the most power.” While this confession, presumably penned by Mr. Kulick himself, is spoken not in English but in untranslated Russian, it’s plain to see what’s going on, since the centerpiece of Tony Straiges’ set is a statue of Lenin that is pulled off its pedestal and smashed to bits as the show gets underway.
What follows is a straightforward yet sensitive rendering of “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” that is enacted with lively simplicity…
Nobody needs to make a case for “The Misanthrope,” but Charles Newell, artistic director of the Court Theatre, has done something equally ingenious with Molière’s satirical masterpiece: He’s come up with a high-concept production devoid of the this-means-that rigidity that is too often the curse of such updated versions.
In Mr. Newell’s staging of Richard Wilbur’s immaculately lucid verse translation of “The Misanthrope,” virtually all of the characters save for Alceste (Erik Hellman), the reflexively tactless anti-hero, are played by black or biracial actors. I doubt I need to tell you how that could have worked out in practice, but Mr. Newell has developed his defining idea in a way that is not schematic but supple. Instead of banging the audience over the head with the obvious fact that Alceste is white, Mr. Newell offers it up as a given and lets us decide for ourselves what it means. Is Alceste a traditionalist at sea in the disorienting world of modernity? That’s my reading, but nothing about Mr. Newell’s staging demands that you agree with me–or, indeed, draw any definitive conclusion as to what he has in mind–and the ambiguity that results is not indecisive but stimulating….
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Read the whole thing here.
A scene from the Court Theatre’s production of The Misanthrope:

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

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About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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