Three new plays.
Clubbed Thumb's "Men on Boats" by Jaclyn Backhaus at Playwrights Horizons is clever, perhaps too clever. The conceit is to have an all female cast enact the all-male expedition in 1869 to traverse the Green and Colorado Rivers in Wyoming for the first time (by the white man). I applaud the truly ensemble cast, too uniform in excellence to single just one or two, under the direction of Will Davis. The minimal set and physicality of the acting create a large space for the imagination which could have been quite magical. In this case, I found the magic lacking although I appreciated the muscle that when into the performances.
"Nat Turner in Jerusalem" at New York Theatre Workshop is a fine play but perhaps too didactic and linear. We are fed the history of the black revolutionary slave on his last night before execution and a look into the mind of Thomas Gray, the man who met with him that night and wrote "The Confessions of Nat Turner," which has become required reading in many American high schools. But that's just it. I felt the play, directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian, was a history lesson rather than a theatrical experience. In an effort to break up the static nature of the play, 90 minutes in a cell, the footprint of the cell is moved incrementally across the stage but this is also static. We wait for the next move, 20 feet along, each time the lights are dimmed between scenes. Philip James Brannon and Rowan Vickers, however, are extraordinarily good as Turner and Gray. I wished for them to have a more adventurous play to act in.
"Phaedra(s)" at the BAM Harvey is a long bewildering mess saved only by the exquisite performance(s) of Isabelle Huppert. I would like to leave it at that but I'll plunge onward. Directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski, the three different versions are "after" (as stated in the program) the plays of Sarah Kane, J.M. Coetzee and Wajdi Mouawad. The first of the three "Phaedra"'s in the work of the Lebanese-born, French-bred Wajdi Mouawad. Just a mess. Why and to what purpose the androgynous Arab go-go dancer? It sucked the air out of the room and went on and on and on to no purpose in service of the story. We could have been spared at least 30 minutes of the exhausting 3 1/2 hour play by eliminating her (him?). For that matter, why the Arabic song that opens the play and goes on interminably? Oh, never mind... Huppert appears first as a very campy Aphrodite before transitioning into Phaedra where she spends almost the entirety of the action of the play writhing about on a bed in the center of the stage with a bloody crotch. You get the idea. The second is by the talented British playwright Sarah Kane whose brilliant "4:48 Psychosis" Huppert performed at BAM ten years ago and who, like Phaedra herself, committed suicide by hanging. This version of the Phaedra story is the most cohesive but a bit leaden. The final Phaedra is realized by the novelist J.M. Coetzee. Huppert is presented as the Australian writer Elizabeth Costello who has come to where(?) to deliver a lecture on the subject of Eros. This version, coming at the end, is the lightest and Huppert is wonderful as the scatty intellectual who pings and pongs all over the subject and finally enacts a scene from Racine's great interpretation of Phaedra. It's beautiful. Oh, to have seen this "Phaedra" in it's entirety instead of this ratty batch of imposters.
