Archives for 2009

There aren’t many theatre artists / companies whose work I simply have to see or curse myself if I’m out of town and am therefore forced to miss. The late great theatre company Theatre de la Jeune Lune is — or rather was — one of these. The British stage director Neil Bartlett is another. The solo theatre artist / standup comedian Will Franken is a third.

Many people probably share my views on Jeune Lune and Bartlett — Perhaps not household names, they are well known within the performing arts field. Franken, however, is in a different league. He’s the sort of performer that ought to be playing sold-out arenas. But despite gigs with or auditions for such well-known entities as the Upright Citizens Brigade, NBC’s Last Comic Standing and the British World Stands Up comedy show in recent years — not to mention favorable reviews in the New York Times and many Bay Area publications (Franken used to be based on the west coast) — word about the performer’s brilliance still remains largely under wraps. I’m trying to figure out why.

Having cursed myself for missing the New York-based performer’s last San Francisco show, I was pleased to finally make it out to The Purple Onion Comedy Club last weekend to catch Franken’s latest west coast stint. He was on better form than I think I’ve ever seen him.

When I think of Franken hunched in his statutory threadbare blazer and tatty jeans under the lights interviewing his own reflection, competing in a poetry slam first as John Milton reading from the opening of Paradise Lost and then as some self-obsessed teenage rapper making lame rhymes (the latter beats the former by a long margin), or telling a funny little story about how his shoes make him feel young, my day immediately brightens. He was marvelous. His comedy flowed effortlessly from one absurdist bit to another. Nothing seemed labored. For the first time, the performer seemed perfectly in control of his out-of-control world. He actually appeared relaxed. 

Franken’s act almost always defies description, though I’ve tried on numerous occasions over past few years to articulate the experience of witnessing his work. Perhaps the best way to consider Franken’s act is to think of it as a journey into the sticky, mothballed recesses of the human mind. He’s like Virginia Woolf channeling Lenny Bruce and the Pythons with just a touch of Bill O’Reilly thrown in to rock the boat. It’s no wonder that a Bay Area newspaper dubbed Franken “Best Alternative to Psychadelic Drugs” a few years ago for its annual “Best of the Bay” issue. A theatre critic colleague of mine, Robert Avila of the San Francisco Bay Guardian came up with a beautiful way of describing the performer:

“Imagine a surreal-estate agent guiding you through some Escher-like architectural marvel, where each room is its own deeply funny, satirical dream, every passageway a verbal wormhole, and in the corner a shaggy high priest of nothing’s-sacredness is fiddling with a bunch of knobs on what looks like an espresso maker.”

I’ve witnessed performances by Franken in which there were too many wormholes with not enough earth to hold the terrain together, where he’s disappeared down a hole and left the rest of us scratching our heads on the surface. But this time, there was just enough sense to keep the madness in check. By the time I left the venue, my face ached from laughing so hard.

Franken is the sort of comedian who defies categorization, which is what makes him so great. Unfortunately, this refusal to fit into a tidy commercial box might be what has prevented him so far from selling out the Hollywood Bowl. I wish he would move back to the Bay Area.

The two-and-a-half-ton bronze spider that has greeted tourists and locals as they stroll along San Francisco’s picturesque waterfront for the past 17 months is about to scuttle away.

The sculpture, Crouching Spider, by the iconic French artist Louise Bourgeois, has been on loan to the city since November 2007 and has enjoyed pride of place at the Embarcadero’s Entry Plaza at Pier 14.

The sculpture was originally cast in 2003 from the artist’s famous Spider series and was made specifically for display in San Francisco. Initially lent for eight months by the artist, courtesy of Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco and Cheim & Read, New York, the sculpture’s stay was extended due to popular support. On Friday, April 24, Crouching Spider will be disassembled into ten pieces and transported to a private collection in Houston, Texas. The removal process will begin at 9 am on Friday, April 24. The arachnid’s separated eight legs and torso will then be and loaded into a truck bound for Houston, Texas. The entire process is expected to take around six hours.

Crouching Spider has been a lurid addition to San Francisco’s waterfront. In as much as it’s huge, comically menacing and has no business, as an insect of the land, being displayed by the sea, the sculpture has jubilantly captured the eccentric, oddball spirit of this city. I will miss it.

I have to commend San Francisco for bringing such eye-catching work to the Embarcadero. Waterfront art is often rather kitsch and dull, with cities favoring twee sculptures of fishermen and sea shells over anything that might make a passerby out for a Sunday stroll pause for thought. San Francisco’s waterfront, however, has been and continues to be home to several startling works of art. These include the massive Burning Man installation Passage by Dan Das Mann and Karen Cusolito depicting two huge human figures made out of strips of rusty metal, the statue of Gandhi at the Ferry Building and Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Cupid’s Arrow.

Everyone’s talking about the YouTube Symphony project, which reached its culmination two evenings ago in a concert at Carnegie Hall led by Michael Tilson Thomas.

Reviews have been mixed. For example, the New York Times was mostly positive and the Washington Post, mostly negative. The blogosphere has been buzzing with comments about the event. Greg Sandow’s detailed post at ArtsJournal yesterday voiced his disappointment with the razzle-dazzle of the event (the celebrities, the video projections, the TV coverage, the not-quite-as-wonderful-as-he’d-hoped musicianship etc). YouTube is packed with video clips concerning the event both by the musicians and other commentators. Here’s a link to the “Internet Symphony Global Mash-Up” on the YouTube site. And here’s a link to the first hour of the concert — also available on YouTube.

I would have loved to have been present at Carnegie Hall. Though I was slightly skeptical about the endeavor on a blog post I wrote about it a few months ago, I was basically extremely excited about the way in which technology was being deployed to bring people from different parts of the world together to make music — and classical, rather than pop, music at that.

I absolutely respect Sandow and Anne Midgette of the Washington Post’s reservations about the musicianship of the concert. It’s impossible to give a nuanced performance when you’ve got two days to rehearse a ton of music with a group of players of varying backgrounds and abilities. I also understand the issues that some critics voiced concerning the populist approach to programming, whereby the orchestra played crowd-pleasing, flashy excerpts from many pieces rather than entire works.

But I personally feel like the final concert wasn’t really the point of the project at all. While it created focus and a needed ultimate goal, it seems to me to me more symbolic in value than anything else. So what if the group didn’t sound like the New York Philharmonic or the Netherlands Royal Concertgebouw? The fact is that Google and its collaborators managed to leverage the power of online collaboration to create a truly international orchestra of commendable talent considering the “speed dating” circumstances under which the group was pulled together. For this, the project deserves high praise.

OK, so maybe there were too many lasers and cheerleadery self-congratulatory video commentaries at the event itself. These may well have detracted from the music for some people and inflated the experience beyond what it should have been inflated from a musical perspective. But on the whole, the organizers and musicians deserve to give themselves a great big pat on the back for pulling off an era-defining stunt and putting classical music into the limelight where it belongs.

Memorials are unusual structures. In a post-modern world of fractured meanings, these structures still attempt (and largely succeed) to present a clear, unified and highly-subjective view on world events. Some memorials, though, defy straightforward interpretation.

One example is the massive holocaust memorial in Berlin — “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” — which has been the cause of much controversy over the past decade for failing to acknowledge the non-Jewish victims of the Nazis and, as part of Germany’s “Holocaust industry”, exploiting the country’s sense of shame and disgrace.

But as I walked through the memorial — which consists of more than 2,700 stone pillars built onto an undulating 4.7 acre plot close to the Brandenburg Gate and was designed by architect Peter Eisenman — it occured to me that this memorial is much more open to interpretation than most other stone-built momento moris.

For one thing, it’s very experiential and interactive. You don’t just look at it. You get inside it. In parts of the memorial, I felt very removed from the sky, like I was in a cave. I felt like I was descending into a labyrinthian dungeon. In other parts, I could perch on a stone pillar, see for miles and feel the warm air around me. At times, I felt very solitary and alone. At others, I felt like I was in a crowd. The pillars seemed like people. Every turn I made, I came across fellow memorial wanderers. I even saw a young couple necking in a shady enclave.

Nowhere inside the memorial or around it, does it say what it commemorates. Which leads me to think that while the structure has been built to commemorate a particular event, it means so much more. It can stand for a place of mourning and a hideaway for a surreptitious tryst.

What does it mean to me? It means death and life both at once. It means getting lost and finding oneself again. Despite the title of the memorial, its Jewishness feel abstract to me, probably because I grew up many decades after the close of the war in a family that, though Jewish, is essentially secular. The intention behind the creation of a memorial is an important consideration. It’s difficult to experience the structure without a thought for the murdered Jews that it seeks to honor. But ultimately, its meaning is as much of a maze as the narrow corridors that greet the explorer as she approaches the structure.

The German choreographer Sasha Waltz’s evening-length dance piece, Travelogue 1 – Twenty to Eight depicts the daily lives of five roommates. With its comic view of the relationships between a group of young urbanites and pressing sense of immediacy, the piece brings the American television series Friends to mind.

Created in 1993, the work not only preempted Friends by a year, but it’s a great deal more captivating than the iconic TV show in my opinion.

I caught the piece at Berlin’s trendy, new riverside arts space, RadialSystem V last week in anticipation of its arrival in San Francisco in May as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival. Waltz recently remounted the work with new dancers. The SFIAF appearance represents the American premiere of this new iteration of the work and festival-goers are in for a treat.

Set against the backdrop of a city apartment complete with refrigerator, murphy bed and kitchen table and chairs, the piece observes at extremely close range the social interactions between a group of mixed personalities. The dancers in the piece are all very different — a point made explicit by the mixed ethnic makeup of the cast and the opening passage, in which we hear a variety of Asian and European languages spoken. Yet despite the differences of their backgrounds, the characters all manage somehow to coexist.

The situation is full of drama. Dancers fly hyperactively in and out of doorways, slamming them as they go over and over again. There’s a loony, almost silent movie-era feel to some of the comic shtick. A section towards the end of the piece between a dancer and the murphy bed feels like something out of a Harold Lloyd film with its technically complex and hilarious contortions and horizontal jumps.

Waltz also knows how to be sensual and serious. A long, passionate duet in which a male and female dancer fuse almost every part of their bodies together has to be one of the most erotic sequences I’ve ever experienced in a modern dance piece. The duet makes the pratfalls between Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer look completely sexless.

I recently watched a couple of old episodes of Friends, a series which I quite enjoyed when I was growing up. The plots and jokes seem really naff and dated to me now. Contrastingly, Waltz’s Travelogue has traveled 16 years since its inception and it still feels fresh.

One reason why art forms such as visual art and dance travel more easily than theatre, books and film is to do with the language barrier. Art that isn’t tied to a particular vernacular isn’t as apt to sacrifice its power and meaning in the same way as it might if it relies heavily on words for communication. This is one of the reasons why there are so many more globe-trotting exhibitions of paintings and sculpture than there are untranslated, traveling productions of plays.

What I’ve discovered over my years of theatre-going — perhaps the last word-oriented artform served up without the benefit of dubbing, sub-titles or sur-titles as is the case with movies and opera — is that even if you can’t understand most or any of what’s being said on stage, you can still get a lot out of a theatre production.

The feeling of foreignness can often be a thematic feature of a show, such as in the case of Tim Supple’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This production rendered Shakespeare almost unintelligible to some theatre-goers owing to its use of many Indian languages in place of the Bard’s already-foreign-sounding Renaissance English. To others (myself included) the language barrier created a new, voluptuously poetic world. The production was able to tour the world because the language barrier was part of the fabric of the piece. Paradoxically, unintelligibility was absolutely integral to our understanding of the play.

But what about the experience of seeing a play in a foreign tongue which was never created with such a conceit in mind? This can also be a formidable experience, albeit a daunting one.

Certainly, seeing productions of plays written in a language you don’t understand takes a bit of practice. When I lived in Moscow and St. Petersburg for a few months ten years ago, I went to see productions in Russian almost every night. My command of the language was extremely basic. I could ask for directions, hail a cab, count to 100, order food and a few other things. But I was ill-equipped to understand the words being spoken on stage most of the time. Still, after a while, I kind of got used to — and even started to revel in — my linguistic shortcomings. I dealt with the issue by boning up on what it was that I was about to see in advance so at least I had a basic idea of the plot and characters. I opened myself up to experiencing plays in a new way. I tried to relax.

This feeling of letting go came back to me acutely last week when I caught Thomas Ostermeier’s production of Hedda Gabler at Berlin’s Schaubuhne. Having seen the play produced on several occasions in the past, I at least had a handle on the basics. What was interesting about this production for someone who’s German isn’t exactly fluent (though it’s better than my Russian) is how unforeign it feels.

Ostermeier’s Hedda is very much a modern adaptation of Ibsen’s play. Even with my limited understanding of the nuances of German, I still heard references to computer technology in the text. I found myself completely drawn into Ostermeier’s contemporary world of glossy oppressiveness. And because I couldn’t always focus on the language, I found myself — as is usual when I attend plays in languages I don’t know — putting my focus more strongly on other elements of the staging, such as the actors’ physicality, the blocking and the visual design.

The set, in particular, is extraordinary. It’s like a character in the play. Depicting the living room and outdoor deck of the home of the Tesmans, it’s a study in airy and transparent spaciousness. It looks like an “ideal living” photo spread in an architectural or design magazine like Metropolis or Dwell. I usually hate sets that revolve constantly between scenes, but the giant, precariously angled mirror reflecting the world below on stage and the glass wall separating the outdoor space from the indoor space work together with the icy lights to create a world of infinite reflection as the set circles around. Even though the characters can’t see each other through walls, we are able to see almost everything owing to the revolutions of the set and the mirror. We get to see the story from every angle. We are voyeurs.

And yet, partly owing to Ostermeier’s decision to stage the entire play without an intermission, the entire thing feels so claustrophobic and relentless that by the end we feel cornered and like we can’t penetrate the world on stage at all. We want to point a finger at the play’s conclusion — blame Hedda or Tesman or Brack for the mess. But we find ourselves completely lost for words. It’s rather like modern life really. Powerful stuff. Not bad for a night out at the theatre when your German amounts to little more than sentences about kaffee und kuchen.

Now here’s an interesting question: If I had perfect command of the German language, would I get more out of the experience of seeing the play? Or would the experience simply be different?

A couple of weeks ago, just before I left for Europe, I wrote a blog entry about the British actor Michael Sheen. I was concerned about Sheen being type-cast as Tony Blair. Turns out I was missing the point entirely.

For one thing, Sheen has actually played the ex-British PM not just twice, but three times. He originally essayed the role in a TV documentary in 2003 entitled The Deal. For another, the issue isn’t really to do with Sheen impersonating Blair; it’s much broader — to do with the actor’s dedication to embodying real-life historical figures in his work on stage and screen.

Sheen’s resume features an staggeringly high number of biographical roles. These include everything from David Frost, Kenneth Williams and Brian Clough (I saw Sheen play the famous British football manager in the captivating, newly released UK film, The Damned United, when I was in London last week) to Henry V, Mozart and the Emperor Nero.

Now I’m slightly concerned that this versatile actor won’t get to play fictional characters as often as he should in the future, having made a name for himself as a “biographer.”

What does it mean to take on a real-life figure as an actor? How does one prepare for these kinds of roles? What are the various challenges of playing someone who’s still alive versus someone from the distant past? And — perhaps most interesting of all — how much of the imagination can an actor bring to such a character or does he have to act more like an impersonator/caricaturist?

Of course, Sheen isn’t an impersonator — not in the traditional comic impersonator sense of the word. In an article for The Times, Frost is correct to view Sheen’s turn in his shoes as being more ‘impressionistic’ than outright impersonation: “You can’t have an impression for two hours of drama — that wouldn’t work,” Frost said in the piece. “It’s not David Frost, but David Frost-inspired.”

There’s also a nice story I recently heard while in London in connection to Sheen’s portrayal of Frost. Apparently, when the interviewer called the actor up on the phone one day out of the blue, the actor asked for the caller to identify himself. “You of all people should recognize my voice,” Frost is reported to have said.

POSTSCRIPT: Matthew B, a reader of my blog at chloeveltman.com, kindly located the video clip in which Sheen tells this story to Jonathan Ross. Thanks Matthew.

Off to Germany and the UK for two weeks. I may post on occasion while I’m traveling, depending on the availability of wi-fi Internet access and time to catch my breath. In any case, I’ll be back at my desk and posting five days a week again as usual starting Monday April 13. Until then, be well.

I always find it interesting to see how particular performers jibe with particular playwrights, composers or directors. Think Fiona Shaw and Deborah Warner. Think Helene Weigel and Bertolt Brecht. Equally intimate relationships sometimes exist between two artists even when they are divided by hundreds of years and thousands of miles in time and space.

Such is the case for the American countertenor David Daniels with regards to the composer Handel. The passion that Daniels feels for Handel’s music was strongly in evidence last night at Herbst Theatre when the countertenor performed a program of works by J. S. Bach and Handel alongside Great Britain’s English Concert Baroque music ensemble.

The concert, produced by San Francisco Performances, was a game of two halves. The first was devoted to Bach, the second to Handel. One half will remain in my memory for a long time. You can probably guess which half I’m talking about.

Daniels brought great musicality to his interpretations of such Bach works as “Vernugte Ruh’, beliebte Seelenlust” (BWV 170), “Qui Sedes” from the Mass in B Minor, “Schlummert ein” (BWV 82) and the famous “Erbame dich” from the Saint Matthew Passion. The last of these was sung sensitively, Daniels’ voice interweaving with the solo violin line like the two were extensions of one another. But the English Concert tooks such a machine-like approach to Bach that all the life was drained from the tidy rhythmic lines. Not even Daniels could squeeze a lyrical quality back into the music. There’s also something funny about the way in which the singer enunciates the German language. He’s all lips and teeth. The vowels sound ungainly in his mouth. “Schlummert” is an odd word at the best of times. Daniels made it sound positively absurd.

Everything changed when the program shifted from German to Italian after intermission. Much more at ease with Handel’s Italian arias and a whole lot less mouthy, Daniels let rip. When the countertenor performed the sweet-spiteful aria “Ombra Cara” from Radamisto, the word “vendetta” (revenge) sent chills down my spine. As the program progressed, the music became increasingly showy. Daniels approached the Partenope aria “Furibondo” like a Baroque Elvis, with low-slung knees, gyrating hips and euphoric little circles of his head while reeling through the skittering passagios. And in the “Mad Scene” from Orlando, he swung between manic glee and introverted sadness. Some of the ends of his lines in the quiet sections were barely audible. But the performance overall was riveting.

Daniels’ predilection for Handel was such that even the staid English Concert came to life, playing the non-vocal Passacaglia from Radamistowith a warmth of feeling that finally did justice to the group’s technical perfection.

The friend who joined me for the concert described Daniels as a “Handel Man.” But what I didn’t know until last night was the countertenor’s particular passion for Italian Handel. “You won’t hear him do German or English Handel,” my friend, a huge fan of the singer’s, told me. “When it comes to Handel, he’s very specific about his tastes.”

One of the things an actor dreads the most in his or her career besides not being cast is being constantly typecast. It’s very hard for performers to move away from playing thugs, upper-class twits and heroes if that’s what gets them a paycheck.

With this in mind, I’d like to voice my concern about Michael Sheen. Sheen is one of the best actors working on stage and screen today. Until a few years ago, his diversity and flexibility were what set him apart from other actors of his generation. I was completely won over by his turn as Amadeus on Broadway opposite David Suchet’s Salieri in 2000. I also caught his lithe Henry V for the Royal Shakespeare Company and his slick David Frost both on stage and screen in Frost/Nixon. On screen, I also enjoyed his role as Robbie Ross in Wilde with Stephen Fry. Sheen’s embodiment of Tony Blair in The Queen was one of the most captivating aspects of that film.

And now I fear this fine actor might get stuck playing this particular politician forever. So it’s no surprise to hear that the actor will reprise the PM in The Special Relationship, a new movie written and directed by Peter Morgan about the relationship between Blair and Bill Clinton. Dennis Quaid and Julianne Moore have been cast as the Clintons.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be getting myself all worked up about an actor playing the same character twice in his career. Surely two turns as Blair isn’t so bad? Some actors do nothing but play the same character (or type of character) over and over again for years. But Sheen’s embodiment of Blair has so far been so complete and engrossing that I fear for his future. In The Queen, his ability to show the British Prime Minister’s political expediency and vulnerability was remarkable. I hated and loved the character at the same time. In short, he played the role a little too well.

Let’s hope he doesn’t end up standing in for the PM’s waxwork at Madame Tussaud’s when the original has to be sent to the shop for touch-ups.

What does it mean to be intimately acquainted with the culture of a city? How can a single person, even one that has lived in one place all his or her life, possibly understand how a metropolis functions on a cultural level when most of our cities are so densely populated and infinitely diverse?

Questions along these lines came up yesterday evening during a conversation with a friend regarding the cultural awareness of the editor of a local news and culture publication here in San Francisco. My friend claimed that this editor was very much up on San Francisco culture because he knows a lot about restaurants and is very outdoorsy. It’s true that San Francisco’s world-class culinary output and dizzying topographical beauty are two of the area’s key assets. (Though I’m not sure if opportunities for hiking, sailing and biking provided by the natural landscape can really be classified as part of a city’s cultural scene). But the editor’s near-complete lack of interest in / knowledge of the city’s arts scene surely stands as an enormous strike against any claim that he can be considered familiar with San Francisco culture?

Herb Caen, the late great columnist, has probably come closer than anyone to getting under the mad-tattooed skin of this city. Decades of covering San Francisco’s literary, theatrical and pop music scenes alongside championing various civic causes like the removal of the waterfront eyesore of a freeway made him a true of San Francisco cultural maven. He was someone who had a multi-perspective view on what this metropolis’ culture means.

But Caen, who died more than a decade ago, worked in arguably less complex and diffuse times than our own. The city has become much more international since his day. Technology has had a huge impact on the cultural scene. The ups and downs of the local economy have also led to further fracturing. As a result, no one in this city today comes close to grasping San Francisco culture as intimately as Caen once did. And yet if he were still alive and working today, he probably would not have as thorough an understanding of local cultural life as was possible a few decades ago.

To truly gain intimacy with the culture of a city, you have to know the culture inside out. You have to spend your life experiencing local arts events across all the genres and various ethnic and social dividing lines. But this can’t be a passive activity: active participation is key. And arts are just a part of the puzzle. Each piece of culture, from a building to a song, must be understood within the greater context of its creation — you have to understand how it springs from and fits into (or doesn’t) the framework of the city in which it came to exist. Doing this requires a deep knowledge of local political and social issues. These in turn require a deep knowledge of national and international issues. The task is impossibly huge in other words. 

The best we can do to understand our local culture, is get out and about as much as we can without sacrificing time for quiet reflection. Keeping an open mind and exploring the cultural scene in the broadest sense of the word is important. Eating out at fancy restaurants and cycling in the hills are wonderful pursuits. But maybe it’s time for this particular editor to check out the local theatre, break-dance, or recycled sculpture scenes once in a while. Doing so might make him better at his job.

Doing blood and guts on stage convincingly is extremely difficult. There are basically two ways you can go with it: Realistic and Anti-Realistic.

Anti-realism is a common choice among theatre companies. Theatre is not a naturalistic medium, so the thicker and more radioactive-colored the fake blood looks and the more hammy or overwrought the death scene, the better. In San Francisco, the local grand guignol theatre company Thrillpeddlers, does this variety of blood-letting extremely well, often eliciting laughs, jeers and the occasional convulsion of disgust for their efforts.

Many companies eschew doing blood realistically because it’s so hard to do. But in recent months, I’ve seen several examples on Bay Area stages that have impressed me a great deal and had a much more visceral impact on me than I’ve ever experienced in a live performance. SF Playhouse‘s production of Tracy Letts’ Bug, Mark Jackson’s production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth under the auspices of Shotgun Players, and, most recently, Killing My Lobster‘s production of Matt Pelfrey’s Pure Shock Value all delivered pure shock value.

I think the result must be due to a combination of very careful blocking, an in-depth study of cinematic techniques cleverly honed for live performance and good quality fake blood.

In Killing My Lobster’s production, which closed over the weekend at The Exit Theatre following a critically-acclaimed run, the splattered brains against a wall at one point resembled a scene from a Quentin Tarantino film, which makes perfect sense because the play draws thematic inspiration from — and, to an extent, sends up — the iconic movie director.

It’s interesting to note that in all three cases mentioned above, the theatres were small. I don’t think any house in which these shows took place seats more than 200 people. The directors and actors, not to mention the design, fight director, stage management and props people, all deserve huge amounts of credit for pulling off the horror at such close quarters. The effect is almost breath-taking. And it’s puzzling too. For the result isn’t naturalistic at all, even though it’s very realistic. Even when done absolutely convincingly, the gore feels completely different from watching similar bloodshed on screen. It sort of bored right into you in a way that cinematic horror fails to. We’ve become anesthetized to this sort of thing in the movies because it’s so run of the mill. But on stage, serious bloodletting manages to make the blood in our veins run simultaneously hot and cold.