Archives for July 28, 2020

In my latest Wall Street Journal drama column, I review the Irish Repertory Theatre’s webcast revival of Conor McPherson’s The Weir. Here’s an excerpt.

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With a handful of exceptions, every important company in the U.S. has canceled or rescheduled its shows through the end of 2020 and hopes to reopen at some point in the first half of 2021. And what will they do until then? A fast-growing number of companies say they’ll fill in the gap with webcasts, though few have described their plans in any detail. To date, the webcasts I’ve reviewed in this space were mostly taped prior to the lockdown, but several companies have also streamed newly produced Zoom-based performances and play readings…

Of these, the best was the New York-based Irish Repertory Theatre’s “performance on screen” (as the company billed it) of Brian Friel’s “Molly Sweeney,” a three-character play whose interconnected monologues were ideally suited to the narrow limitations of Zoom. Now the Irish Rep has topped itself with an even more technically ambitious revival of Conor McPherson’s “The Weir,” a five-actor play that the company produced to great acclaim in 2013 and remounted two years later. Despite certain minor failings, it is by far the most impressive socially distanced theater webcast I have seen.

First seen in this country on Broadway in 1999, “The Weir” is, like so many of Mr. McPherson’s plays, an exercise in storytelling. It centers on four ghost stories told by a quartet of Irish drinkers (Dan Butler, Sean Gormley, John Keating and Amanda Quaid) who are forced by a storm to hole up in a village pub (the fifth person, played by Tim Ruddy, is the bartender). The common theme that binds together their homely tales is the loneliness at the heart of the human condition, and each tale is progressively more unsettling—and more believable….

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Read the whole thing here.

A featurette about the Irish Rep’s original 2013 stage production of The Weir:

A new episode of Three on the Aisle, the twice-monthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.

Here’s American Theatre’s “official” summary of the proceedings: 

This week the critics return, and some theatres are starting to return as well. These include Berkshire Theatre Festival, Barrington Stage, and American Shakespeare Center in Virginia. The third has been listed as “do not work” by Actor’s Equity. The critics discuss these shows, the ethics of covering them, and the response—and responsibility—of unions. They also respond to listener emails on theatrical gatekeeping and Zoom despair, and talk about their picks for the week…

To listen to or download this episode, read more about it, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.

In case you’ve missed any previous episodes, you’ll find them all here.

From 2005:

The exaggerated scale of the building swamps the art it contains, and the austere décor is so rigidly uniform in its self-conscious simplicity as to make the museum seem even bigger than it is. As if to compensate—which it doesn’t—most of the galleries are as overstuffed with paintings as they are overcrowded with people, making it impossible to concentrate on any one work with anything remotely approaching ease. And while I’m hardly the first person to remark on the mall-like character of the new MoMA, I found it even more oppressive this time around. I came away feeling that visitors were intended not to commune with the art on the walls but to pass by it briskly on the way from the food court to the museum store, sped on their hasty way by the endless banks of escalators that in retrospect strike me as the building’s most memorable feature….

Read the whole thing here.

“The approach he adopts may be a form of Impressionism, or even of Abstraction, depending on his age group and education, but it will necessarily be a familiar one. He is interested in playing a fascinating game, not in making up new rules. He is visiting a world already explored by other painers rather than creating and imposing a world of his own. His real originality has already found its expression elsewhere. Otherwise he would long ago have quit his own profession for that of painter, as Gauguin gave up a career on the stock exchange in his pursuit of art. The price of originality is undivided love.”

Maurice Grosser, Critic’s Eye