Just a decade ago in Nepal, a crown prince (presumably miffed at his mother’ s opinion of his fiancee) slew both his parents and most of the rest of the royal family, then finished the job by shooting himself. The suicide was handled more sloppily than the murders, placing the terrorist prince in a three-day coma before he died—during which time he was duly sworn in as king of Nepal.
This incredible real- life tragedy, and its attendant unbelievable example of how far a country will go to uphold a monarchy, seems organic grist for a frenzied political theater piece along the lines of Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Yet Rey Planta is more like one of the measured, text-driven monologues of Fo’s wife Franca Rame.
Manuela Infante’s perversely reserved, calmy provocative play is receiving an overdue US premiere at the Yale Cabaret in a brand new translation by Yale school of Drama dramaturgy student Alexandra Ripp. The staging by Michael Place is so decidedly anti-sensational that it risks being static and sterile. The glory of the translation, direction, performances and design are that they keep your eyes attracted to a show where the leading performer seldom does more than quiver.

The piece is played out as if the King-in-a-coma was on exhibition in an art gallery. A security guard sits in a corner reading the newspaper and occasionally wanders through the gallery, and a cleaning woman also makes an appearance, but that’s the entirety of the action. — is front and center onstage, but he doesn’t go out of body and start animatedly narrating the circumstances of his demise, or flashing back to livelier times, la Sunset Boulevard. He doesn’t talk. He stares deadly ahead, sometimes pitches forward, drools a little. As carefully modulated by Robert Grant, none of this coma composure is overdone or in poor taste; it fits the calm and elegant art gallery backdrop.
While his body rests, the King’s mind is active, alert and extremely loquacious. His articulate, philosophical, uncommonly self-reflective and contemplative expressions are voiced through an offstage microphone by the unseen Monique Bernadatte. Last week, Bernadette was the largely mute yet physically vital presence in Alexandru Mihail’s Cabaret adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. She’s really got this voice/body disconnect thing down. Her interpretation of “The King’s Thought” is smooth, even-tempered, unflappable yet still passionate and resonant and rhythmic and musical, like something out of a Robert Ashley opera.

Manuela Infante is skillful at articulating the social changes of Nepal and the personal turmoil of its out-of-touch rulers. The real-life story of the country had a happy aftermath—the machinations of the man who eventually took power (the uncle of the young coma-king portrayed in Rey Planta) led to a people’s uprising which dethroned the monarch and gave way to a new democratic system of government. This play, first presented in 2006, doesn’t go there. It’s more of a reflection on how bad things had become. The fact that they’re better now seems inevitable.

While you know where the playwright’s sympathies lie, this is not a polemic. It’s a portrait of a vulnerable human whose family oversaw a vulnerable country.
Yet while keeping the tone reserved and formal, Rey Planta is nonetheless able to make royalty seem ridiculous. The Cabaret production captures all the subtleties of Infante’s carefully wrought monologue. Robert Grant looks both laughable and pitiable in his tall red scraggly crown. He is a portrait out of place with the others on the wall, yet his is by far the most fascinating.

I’m really sorry that the Yale Cabaret didn’t have photos of this immaculate, beautifully composed production that I could share with you. Given the tight, shallow confines of the stage (necessary to validate the art-gallery conceit), the clarity of Glenn Isaacs projection design and the (uncredited) lighting design adds depth, light, grandeur and layers of additional meaning to this spare, single-voiced script. The show can be slowgoing to be sure, but they couldn’t have dressed this up any finer if they were doing it in a Nepalese castle. The challenges of this unusually structured and visualized piece are clear, and just as clearly the Cabaret is up to that challenge.
In this week of international protests and open questioning of ruling capitalist powers, Rey Planta shows us that there’s more to revolution than shooting and shouting.

Here’s the Freedom Theatre’s mission statement, from the company’s website.

Through its work, The Freedom Theatre aims to:
• Raise the quality of performing arts and cinema in the area.
• Offer a space in which children and youth can act, create and express themselves freely, imagining new realities and challenging existing social and cultural barriers.
• Empower the young generation to use the arts to promote positive change in their community.
• Break the cultural isolation that separates Jenin from the wider Palestinian and global communities.

In order to fulfill these aims, the following strategies are employed:
• Offering professional training in theatre and cinema for youth and young adults.
• Staging regular theatre productions which explore new and increasingly advanced artistic and technical trends.
• Raising awareness among its participants and audiences on important issues in the community and the role of arts in bringing about social change.
• Providing a wide range of drama and cinema activities for children and youth in Jenin Refugee Camp, Jenin City and surrounding villages.
• Hosting performances by theatre and performing arts groups from other parts of Palestine and abroad.
• Engaging its participants in international exchanges and building up a wide network of partners and supporters worldwide through effective advocacy and public relations work.
The Freedom Theatre has staged productions ranging from Waiting for Godot and the original devised work Sho Kman to adaptations of Animal Farm, Alice in Wonderland and Crime and Punishment.
At Yale, members of the Freedom Theatre company will present a “theatrical introduction to the theatre’s work,” screen a video of highlights from past productions, and discuss the life and work of Juliano Mer-Khamis. The New Haven stop is part of an extensive U.S. visit by the company, which recently has toured in Europe.
The 90-minute Yale presentation begins at 4:30 p.m. in the downstairs lounge of the Yale Repertory Theatre at the corner of Chapel and York streets. It’s a free event, open to the public. More info here.

An image from the Freedom Theatre's recent production of Waiting for Godot. The actor in the photo, Rami Hwayel, is one of several students from the Palestinean theater troupe to have allegedly been taken captive by the Israeli Army.

Spectral Scriabin, a collaboration of piano and lights performed by Eteri Andjaparidze and designed by Yale's own Jennifer Tipton, comes to the university's No Boundaries series in February. Photo by Chris Lee.

The series’ 2011-12 slate was announced last week. It represents a rare and longrunning collaboration between the undergraduate Yale Theater Studies program’s World Performance Project and the Yale School of Drama graduate program. No Boundaries presents three visiting theater or dance companies a year. Beyond the performances, there are usually related workshops and seminars. The series tends to go for artists that are pushing the bound…—let’s just say envelope this time—of language and established theatrical formats.
No Boundaries has offered an exhilarating range of good to bad, with indifference never an option.

Here they come, boundarying in:
• Nov. 3-5: The American premiere of Engagement Feminin: An Evening of West African Contemporary Dance with the Burkina Faso-based company Art’Dev/Compagnie Auguste-Bienvenue. Art’Dev is a truncation of Association Artistique Développement. The directors are Auguste Ouedraogo and Bienvenue Bazie, both of whom are in their early 30s; they founded Art’Dev in 2000. While Ouedraogo and Bazie are male, they are conscious of the lack of dances by and about women in West Africa. The hour-long Engagement Feminin piece, in which dancers “explore the everyday choices the women of their communities make,” is part of that outreach.

• Feb. 10-11: Spectral Scriabin, a solo piano concert by Eteri Andjaparidze enhanced by “illumination” of renowned stage lighting designer Jennifer Tipton.
The Russian-born but now New York-based, Andjaparidze was at Yale just last year, doing Schumann duets with Boris Berman for the School of Music’s Horowitz Piano Series. Jennifer Tipton is a leading light ‘round these parts: the 2008 MacArthur fellow teaches at the Yale School of Drama and her recent theater lighting designs include The Glass Menagerie at Long Wharf and Autumn Sonata at Yale Rep.
Such “illuminated” concerts were a huge deal on the festival circuit a few years ago—lightshow enhancements for those who’d grown up on Pink Floyd laser shows and who’d learned to sit still for classical music. Tipton’s the top artist you could hope to get for such an endeavor, and compose Scriabin himself would likely have approved of the format: he experimented with various linkings of sound, light and color, and may have had the neurological condition synesthesia, which heightens one’s sensitivity to sound to the point where it’s similar to taste or vision. The hour-long event contains excerpts from the composer’s Poeme Languide in B Major, Feuillet d’Album in F Sharp Major and Opus Posthumous.
Spectral Scriabin was performed last October at New York’s Baryshknikov Arts Center and has a California gig shortly after this Yale one.

• March 23 & 24: Neva, written and directed by Chilean political theater artist Guillermo Calderón and performed by his ensemble Teatro en el Blanco.
The Yale Rep (Three Sisters) and the Yale School of Drama (The Seagull) are both checking into Chekhov, so why not No Boundaries? Guillermo Calderon’s Neva, performed in Spanish with supertitles, is an original work set in 1905, after Chekhov’s death. On a darkly lit rehearsal stage in 1905 , the playwright’s widow Olga Knipper laments his passing, and also the passing of a way of life and a way of performing.
I was in Los Angeles this past summer, where Neva was a hit attraction at the Radar L.A. festival. One of my esteemed colleagues at the Engine28 website project, Kerry Lengel, reviewed the show, here. Another Engine28er, Ben Waterhouse, posed a technical question to Calderon—how come he staged this ostensibly historical drama around a modern space-heater appliance? Answer here.

Guillermo Calderon's Neva. Photo by Pepe Murrieta.

For Boundaries details, go here, and don’t forget about all the related symposia, talkbacks and workshops. This is an especially interactive and multi-faceted series, befitting the fresh and sometimes challenging concepts No Boundaries brings to town.

The workshops were a success, and some of the folks involved in them travelled to Nicaragua later in the summer, practicing the Forum Theatre principles devised by political performance theorist Augusto Boal.

Now comes the local presentation of A Peasant of El Salvador, directed by Rob Esposito (of Co-op High School’s theater department) at the black box theater in Fair Haven School (164 Grand Ave., New Haven). Performances are Oct. 6 at 8 p.m. (a pay-what-you-can preview), Oct. 7 at 8 p.m,, a matinee Oct. 8 at 3 p.m. and Oct. 13 & 14 at 8 p.m. Tickets are available by calling (866) 631-8880 or visiting www.bregamos.org.

The run of the show, which has dialogue in both English and Spanish, was timed for National Hispanic Heritage Month. A Peasant of El Salvador is presented by the Fair Haven-based Bregamos Community Theater in conjunction with the New Haven/Leon Sister City Project.

Wesleyan Center for the Arts in Middletown is premiering a new play by Ron Jenkins tonight. The reading is held at 7 p.m. tonight, Sept. 28, in the center’s CFA Hall, for free.

Must be cool to go to school where Ron Jenkins teaches.

I never studied with him, but I followed Jenkins for years in his non-academic roles of translator, director, playwright and clown. He’s worked with friends of mine and I’ve learned from his books and scholarship, much of which has to do with European clowning traditions.

But where he most stood out for me is onstage, as live translator and interpreter for the great Italian playwright and satirist Dario Fo. I first glimpsed Jenkins’ special talents in this regard back in the mid-1980s, when Fo was allowed to make one of his rare trips to the United States, where he and his wife  Franca Rame performed at Harvard and Yale. The couple’ s visa weren’t accepted again for another couple of decades; by this time Jenkins was ensconced at Wesleyan, so that’s where Fo and Rame played.

If all he was good for was bringing Dario Fo and Franca Rame to Connecticut every once in a while, and translating their brilliant writings, and writing his own books about them, I’d think Ron Jenkins was just great. But there’s more. Jenkins is a teacher and scholar with a bent for political, topical and socially conscious stagework. That could seem deadly to some, except that his other passion is clowning. Even the most serious and severe Jenkins projects don’t forget to entertain.

He’s a great fit for Wesleyan, where multiculturalism and progressive thought are classroom tools as frequently utilized as pen and paper.

All this is preface to a special Ron Jenkins event on the Wesleyan campus Sept. 28. It’s a reading of a new Ron Jenkins play, Recycling Pain. The project grew out of Jenkins’ ongoing collaborative theater work with incarcerated and recently incarcerated men and women, not just in the United States but in Italy and Indonesia.

It’s Jenkins’ desire as an artist to counter social stereotypes associated with prisons, which is interesting enough for any theater project. But the play also has a major environmental theme. Here’s the description from the Wesleyan press release:

Recycling Pain is based on Mr. Jenkins’s work over the past four years, including interviews with incarcerated men and women in Italy, Indonesia and the United States who were inspired by the poetry of Dante’s Divine Comedy to reflect on the consequences of wasting energy. Their observations are reminders that the importance of conserving and recycling the human resources in our jails is no less important than the challenge of conserving and recycling the natural resources of the planet. Recycling Pain was also compiled from the Department of Justice Report on the Federal Prison Industry’s electronic recycling program. 

Recycling Pain was commissioned by the Wesleyan Center for the Arts for its annual environmental-consciousness program Feet to the Fire. More info on that is here.

Saundra Duncan, Lynda Gardner and Deborah Ranger are in the cast and Ala Faller provides music.

David Bowie—Starman

By Paul Trynka (Little, Brown/Hachette, 2011)

This is the first Bowie bio I’ve found that gives serious attention to the erstwhile David Jones’ stage- and film-acting projects alongside his musical ones.

The book devotes over six pages just to the BBC’s 1981 TV adaptation of Brecht’s Baal, in which Bowie starred. It’s revealed that before casting Bowie as the violent poet, director Alan Clarke and writer/translator John Willett considered Stephen Berkoff and Barry “Dame Edna” Humphries for the role. Bowie apparently captivated the creative team with his intuitive understanding of Weill’s songwriting, which he likened to plainsong, and his knowledge of the Neu Sachlickeit post-Expressionist art movement.

“Baal,” writes Trynka, “was destined to become a lost artifact, often discussed by Brecht scholars.Today, only the CD remains to document what was not only one of Bowie’s bravest artistic efforts but also his final Berlin project.” In an appendix to the biography, Tryka assesses all of Bowie’s recorded works and declares of the Baal soundtrack: “The blinkered view of Bowie’s career is that his last great album was Scary Monsters, yet this contract-filler—recorded in two rushed days in Berlin—is, in its own way, a masterpiece.”

“It wasn’t exactly West Side Story”?! No kidding. But you know that some writers and editors agonized over that metaphor. Couldn’t be too specific. Couldn’t romanticize the wrongdoers. OK to make authority figures bumbling but not thoroughly incompetent or corrupt. Nothing can suggest an agenda. Has to be straight-out hooliganism. No “Les Misearables” comparisons, then. You’d think you’d be history if you quoted Shakespeare either: his passionate agendas and charismatic rulers would eviscerate the extremely simple point that you’re trying to make.

Pity for the London Times, then, that West Side Story—several of whose characters admittedly live and die by street violence—is based on Romeo and Juliet. Other than angry young people throwing things, there’s no useful connection between West Side Story and the riots and looting that have swept through England in the last few days.

If you want to connect a news story about sweeping up the trash in a crumbling class-clashing society, why not go for Mary Poppins, or Stomp? Makes more sense than West Side Story.

West Side Story’s violence is contained, a feud among families and gangs, a neighborhood civil war of vulnerable immigrant communities. The London riots? Not much of a plot there at all.

Reducing unbelievable disaster to the phrase “”like a movie” is a common sort of post-crisis journalistic denial, as if finding order and meaning in chaos must suggest that someone scripted it. The impulse to reduce the inconceivable to images from pop-culture fictions quickly gives way to genuine human survival tales. Today’s heroine is the young woman who was photographed leaping from a burning building. Tomorrow’s stories will be about the cost of rebuilding, and all arts references will be forgotten.

The real shame is that England nurtured a whole generation of playwrights—Edward Bond, Howard Brenton, David Edgar—who’ve eloquently articulated the roots of street violence, social injustice and class warfare. We should looking up those guys rather than finding the most mindless and non-threatening theatrical metaphors for things getting out of hand.

Why analyze, when you can just blame the very last buggin’ gang on the whole buggin’ street? On the whole ever-mother-lovin’ streeeeeeet…

A dizzying array of disaster metaphors in today’s news. Avalanche, plunge, teetering on the brink… the only ones left to use in tomorrow’s papers will be locusts and paper cuts. But that theater panic riff really stuck out for us. What shows should those jittery crowds be seeing with their fast-dwindling disposable income?

The American Clock by Arthur Miller. A chronicle of the 1929 Wall Street crash and its aftermath, by a playwright who lived through it and whose writing career began with a New Deal WPA gig. It only lasted 12 performances on Broadway, but college and community theaters have kept the fires burning. Boasting one of the largest casts of any Miller play, it was made into a TV movie in 1993, adapted by Frank Galati and directed by none other than Bob Clark, of Porky’s and A Christmas Story fame. The TV cast is astounding—everyone from Mary McDonnell to Joanna Miles, Kelly Preston to Estelle Parsons, Jim Dale to Eddie Bracken, Yaphet Kotto to Tony Roberts. David Straithairn and Darren McGavin play the same character at different ages!

Grapes of Wrath by Frank Galati again. The great adaptor explored the upper classes losing their cash in his American Clock screenplay. His take on Steinbeck’s book covers the lost dreams of those who never had money in the first place.

Paradise Lost by Clifford Odets. Its original 1935 Group Theatre production in New York didn’t last long, but today’s recession-conscious regional theater scene has found a new audience for this financial mishap melodrama. It’s had stagings at Oregon Shakes, ART and The Intiman in recent seasons.

Flora, The Red Menace by George Abbott, Robert Russell, John Kander and Fred Ebb. A 1965 musical presented as if it were produced by the Federal Theatre Project.

Annie, Rainmaker, half a dozen other Odets, more variations on Grapes of Wrath… We could keep going on Great Depression shows forever. Let’s move on to other eras:

The Admirable Crichton by J.M. Barrie. An epic of financial reversal, in which a servant is better equipped for survival and powermongering when money is removed from the social equation. Not just economically but environmentally aware, the play chickens out in its final act before it can make a strong statement about societal class shake-ups.

Other People’s Money by Jerry Sterner. The seriocomic consequences of corporate takeovers.

The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare. Arrogance, racism and cultural one-upmanship all based on whether or not one’s ship comes in.

An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen. A defense of whistleblowers and rational planners in communities blinded by the promise of easy short-term riches at the expense of long-term health.

Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme by Moliere. Nipping social-climibing in the bud, not because of national financial concerns and austerity trends, but due to commonsense exasperation at unchecked vanity and ludicrous luxuries. Rewritten for the 1980s by the great Charles Ludlam and ridiculously retitled Le Bourgeois Avant-Garde.

Curse of the Starving Class by Sam Shepard. A play so full of stuff that it has resonated with every political or cultural upheaval in America since it was written in 1978. Corresponds neatly with today’s turmoil by referencing zombies.

You can hear the BBC’s interview with Blee here; it’s not indexed on the BBC website as part of the program, since it was probably a very late add-on. It starts at six minutes and 17 seconds into the show and lasts just over three minutes. The Art Newspaper did its own piece on Blee’s Debate, here.

Besides analyzing the scenic design for this impromptu performance, the Front Row bit is also notable for host John Wilson’s referring to the assailant, Jonnie Marbles, as a “so-called comedian.” A lot of commenters on the various YouTube videos available of Marbles monologues don’t seem to appreciate his humor. But whether or not you like his politics, he’s doing lengthy, scripted humorous monologues, and I’d say that defines him as a comedian.
Huffington Post profiles Marbles, and embeds, some of his routines, here.