“There’s nothing sadder than an old hipster.”

Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review Chicago Shakespeare’s Tug of War: Civil Strife and the Broadway premiere of Simon McBurney’s The Encounter. Here’s an excerpt.

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The most important Shakespeare production of the year to date is taking place not in New York or London but at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. “Tug of War,” Barbara Gaines’ marathon staging of six of the history plays, got under way four months ago with “Foreign Fire,” a six-hour condensation of “Edward III,” “Henry V” and the first part of “Henry VI.” Now comes “Civil Strife,” in which Ms. Gaines squeezes the second and third parts of “Henry VI” and “Richard III” into an identical and equally eventful span of time interrupted at midpoint by a break for dinner. Like “Foreign Fire” before it, “Civil Strife” is overwhelming, the kind of show that blasts its way into your head and stays there for days afterward.

In both installments of “Tug of War,” Ms. Gaines bends Shakespeare’s plays to her own moral purpose, reshaping his chronicle of a nation convulsed by foreign and domestic strife into a tightly edited modern-dress pacifist pageant accompanied by a four-piece rock band. Yet you rarely feel that she has misused Shakespeare by politicizing him, any more than Laurence Olivier misused “Henry V” in 1944 by turning it into a resplendent piece of whip-the-Nazis Technicolor propaganda. Both interpretations, for all their palpable differences, are firmly rooted in the text, whose poetry is protean in its implications. And while “Tug of War” cannot help but simplify the individual plays out of which it is carved, it also gives you the priceless opportunity to view those same plays not as free-standing panels but as parts of a giant historical mural. To do so for the first time is to feel as though you’re finally grasping what Shakespeare was up to….

“The Encounter,” Simon McBurney’s new one-man show, requires the audience to wear headphones throughout the evening as Mr. McBurney, the co-founder and artistic director of Complicite and one of England’s foremost avant-garde theater artists, recounts the real-life experiences of Loren McIntyre, a photojournalist who got lost in the Brazilian rain forest in 1969 and had a mystical experience—that’s an oversimplification, but I don’t know what else to call it—after meeting up with a native tribe. At first glance “The Encounter” feels like a radio play accompanied by thick layers of sound effects, some live and others pre-recorded. (The first part reminded me of Glenn Gould’s similarly complex CBC radio documentaries.) Then the set, an anonymous-looking radio studio, comes to hallucinatory life, and suddenly you find yourself swept up in Mr. McBurney’s high-tech dramatization of McIntyre’s bizarre yet somehow believable tale….

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To read my review of Tug of War: Civil Strife, go here.

To read my review of The Encounter, go here.

The trailer for Tug of War: Civil Strife:

The trailer for The Encounter:

Orson Welles takes questions from a panel of British reporters on Press Conference, originally telecast by the BBC on January 14, 1955:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“‘I never understood the theater until last night. Please forgive everything I’ve ever written. By the time you read this I’ll be dead.’—Clive Barnes”

David Mamet (originally published in Mary Ann Madden, “New York Magazine Competition: Competition Number 395,” New York, October 13, 1980)

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• An American in Paris (musical, G, too complex for small children, closes Jan. 1, reviewed here)
• The Color Purple (musical, PG-13, some performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, closes Jan. 1, reviewed here)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• A Day by the Sea (drama, G, not suitable for children, newly extended through Oct. 30, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Sense & Sensibility (serious romantic comedy, G, remounting of 2014 off-Broadway production, closes Nov. 20, original production reviewed here)
• A Taste of Honey (drama, PG-13, extended through Oct. 20, reviewed here)

IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:
• Sense & Sensibility (serious romantic comedy, G, remounting of 2014 off-Broadway production, closes Oct. 30, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN TYSON, VA.:
• Lobby Hero (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 16, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Fiorello! (musical, G, off-Broadway transfer of 2016 regional revival, closes Oct. 7, original production reviewed here)

“One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay ‘in kind’ somewhere else in life.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, North to the Orient

The Kinks perform Ray Davies’ “Sunny Afternoon” in a 1966 promotional video:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive.”

Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire