Culture Vulture: Under the Radar Festival

My experience with this year’s Under the Radar Festival, the always-adventurous wide-ranging performance fiesta that turns the doldrums of January into a hotbed of theatergoing, began with Samuel Beckett (below left) and ended with James Joyce (below right), which was perfect for me. Those guys have been cultural icons for me since my high school mentor Jay Junker turned me on to them (along with the Grateful Dead, Leonard Cohen, Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks, and lots of other great music).

JoAnne Akalaitis’s production of Beckett’s All That Fall represents Mabou Mines going back to its roots. The legendary collective has a long history with Beckett, skipping over the heavyweights (Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, Krapp’s Last Tape) and from the very beginning gravitating instead toward the tiny dramatic scraps (Come and Go, Play) and curious bits of texts not ostensibly written to be performed (Cascando, The Lost Ones, Company, Mercier and Camier, Imagination Dead Imagine). And in its early days (the 1970s), they aligned as much with performance art as much as with theater. They showed their work in art galleries, and they collaborated with visual artists, sculptors, and composers whose contributions were not ancillary but central to the productions.

I wasn’t in New York City in the 1970s, and I didn’t see those gallery performances of Lee Breuer’s “Animations” (The Red Horse Animation, The B. Beaver Animation). So it was a treat to catch a glimpse of that era via Akalaitis’s staging of All That Fall, which Beckett adamantly insisted be performed only as a radio play. Akalaitis turned it into an art installation in which the stars of the show are the set, sound, and lighting designers. To perform the text of the play (a quirky episodic country drama not quite like anything else Beckett produced), Akalaitis assembled a solid cast -- including downtown veterans Randy Danson, Tony Torn, Wendy vanden Heuvel, and Steve Rattazzi -- whom we got to see in costume in a slideshow prelude (see below) but then never again.

What we did see, walking into the Mabou Mines space at Performance Space New York, was a room-wide diorama depicting the small town in which the play takes place – Ireland in the original text, but here explicitly set in Nova Scotia (where the founding members of the company – Akalaitis and her then-husband Philip Glass, Breuer and his partner Ruth Maleczech, and David Warrilow – first coalesced and named themselves after the Cape Breton village of Mabou). This elaborate set, designed by Thomas Dunn, depicted a scale model of a provincial village, with little houses and roads and bridges, with occasional stylized touches — a full-sized bicycle, a miniature ship representing the Lusitania, mentioned in passing in the play. (You can get a sneak preview of the set from this Instagram reel.) As the pre-recorded text unspools, Jennifer Tipton’s maniacally detailed lighting provided the action in the play, drawing the audience’s eye to the location of each little scene, while Bruce Odland’s sound score evoked weather, vehicles, animals, and whatever it took to animate the tiny town aurally.

I was happy to experience this rarely-done Beckett play, and as a bonus I treasured the director’s note in the printed program. Although I’ve read at least one biography of Beckett and was dimly aware of his resistance work during World War II, I hadn’t retained the details and felt edified by Akalaitis’s brief summary.

For desperate artists in these present wounded times, we look to Beckett’s defiance in the face of censorship and his active resistance again fascism for inspiration…

--joined a resistance group Gloria SMH in Paris, during the occupation of France, for the dangerous job of coding and microfilming information about Axis troop movements. When Gloria was betrayed, its members were hunted down and arrested by the Gestapo, tortured, and sent to camps…

--with his wife Suzanne fled their Paris flat with a few belongings, little money, and walked 150 miles for 6 weeks traveling by night and hiding in barns, ditches, and even trees during the day. They spent the war in a small village, constantly in fear of betrayal, Beckett speaking French with an Irish accent, somehow surviving by working for farmers in exchange for food. He was creatively blocked during this time, writing only [the novella] Watt.

--received the Crois de Guerre from Charles de Gaulle for what he called his “boyscout activities.”

--volunteered to build an Irish hospital in Saint-Lô (one of his jobs was exterminating rats in the children’s and maternity ward) after the war.

--received the Nobel Prize, and immediately went to Tunisia; he subsequently donated the prize money to artist friends, productions, and libraries.

Excellent performer Elizabeth Marvel and director Lee Sunday Evans cooked up The Ford/Hill Project, which had a brief run at La Mama ETC January 7-11. This performance documentary took as its text the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings in 1991 and 2018 in which Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford reported their experiences of unwanted sexual attention from Supreme Court nominees Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh. The brilliant four-person cast worked with in-ear devices feeding them the verbatim transcripts of the hearings. Marvel (above right) and Amber Iman (above left) primarily represented Ford and Hill while Josh Hamilton and Jon Michael Hill primarily spoke as Kavanaugh and Thomas. But at times they switched it up, having the men play the women and the women play not only the SCOTUS nominees but also the senators questioning them. (All the actors were amazing, but I have to say Josh Hamilton was inspired casting for Kavanaugh.)

As a feat of performance, it was thrilling to watch. As a history recap, it was enraging to experience the wave of humility and courage from the women and arrogance and contempt from the men. The written program included two pages of resources related to sexual assault and domestic violence. After the performance, three community advocates – Charlene Allen, Devin Deane, and Purvi Shah – conducted a public conversation about restorative justice, a process of addressing violence in ways that are non-carceral, trauma-informed, and community-centered.

Across the street at New York Theater Workshop’s intimate upstairs second stage, Roger Guenveur Smith performed In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat. It was not exactly an impersonation of Basquiat – as with his previous portraits of Huey Newton, Rodney King, and others, Guenveur Smith evoked the spirit of Basquiat, whom he knew personally, combining biographical info with context-setting scenes. A séance? A spell? Key to the conjuring was the live sound design supplied by Marc Anthony Thompson, aka recording artist Chocolate Genius. I loved how with the slightest of cues Guenveur Smith had the OGs in the crowd clapping and chanting along to “Planet Rock.” And speaking of OGs, at the curtain call Guenveur Smith introduced two dudes in the front row, Al Diaz (who was the other half of the graffiti crew SAMO with Basquiat) and Eric Johnson (a photographer central to the 1980s art scene that Basquiat inhabited).

Elevator Repair Service has a long history of creating spectacular theater by adapting literary classics: Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and most famously F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The two-part, seven-hour production of Gatz included every word of Fitzgerald’s novel, mostly spoken from memory by company member Scott Shepherd. Most recently Shepherd and ERS artistic director John Collins have tackled James Joyce’s Ulysses – how’s that for a modest undertaking?

Ulysses is one of those famously difficult classics that many people have heard about and even studied in college but never actually read. As a precocious teenager under Jay’s tutelage, I dutifully read Ulysses – at least I turned every page, without understanding much of what I read and retaining only a few images. Truthfully, I understood some things about the novel for the first time just reading the brief synopsis in the ERS Playbill:

The main action of the novel follows the wanderings and ruminations of Leopold Bloom, an ad broker, on a single day in Dublin: June 16, 1904. He’s staying out of the house to allow his wife Molly, a locally admired soprano, to begin a love affair with her concert promoter Blazes Boylan. The Blooms haven’t had complete sexual intercourse since their son Rudy died in infancy eleven years ago.

Stephen Dedalus, the hero of Joyce’s previous Novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is also wandering around Dublin. He returned early from a stay in Paris to be present at his mother’s deathbed. An avatar of Joyce himself, Stephen is a young writer with grand literary aspirations and a drinking problem. Bloom encounters Stephen late in the day and attempts to take him under his wing.

Molly appears briefly in an early chapter, persistently inhabits Bloom’s thoughts, and finally commands our undivided attention in the final episode, after Bloom has crawled into bed beside her and fallen asleep in the imprint left by Boylan. Her reflections on the day and on her life end the novel in a long unpunctuated stream of free-associative thoughts.

(A more detailed breakdown of all 18 episodes of the book is available online and serves as an excellent Cliff’s Notes companion.)

photos by Maria Baranova

Shepherd (above right) and Collins managed to boil down 700+ pages to two hours and 45 minutes, utilizing the full arsenal of theatrical strategies familiar to fans of ERS (which itself owes much to its downtown forebears, the Wooster Group and Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater). It opens with the entire cast sitting at three conference tables (shades of the Wooster Group’s L.S.D., which they’re reviving this year, incidentally).

Shepherd is the Spalding Gray-like MC-narrator. ERS stalwarts Vin Knight (above) and Maggie Hoffman (below) portray Leo and Molly Bloom.

Fellow company member Kate Benson and three newcomers – Dee Beasnael, Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, and Stephanie Weeks – fill in all the other roles. A clock on the wall keeps the audience posted on where we are in Bloomsday, speeding up and backtracking as the adaptation fast-forwards over the bits they’ve cut, video of the text scrolling by and the actors reeling back in their seats as if taking off in a rocket.

It’s sort of the comic-book version of Ulysses and yet it captures the essence of the book with its many flavors of humor, longing, playfulness, poetry, erudition, and vulgarity. (People fuck, shit, fart, and masturbate, which is why the book was banned in the US and the UK when it was first published in 1922. The ban was lifted in a landmark court case in 1933.) Despite the title, it’s easy to forget that Joyce modeled Bloom’s wanderings around Dublin on The Odyssey. And Shakespeare is thoroughly embedded among Joyce’s literary references, including the theory propounded by Stephen Dedalus that Hamlet’s grandson was Shakespeare’s grandfather – an apocryphal story, though Shakespeare did play the ghost of Hamlet’s father opposite Richard Burbage in the original production.

I chatted at intermission with Tim Sanford, the former artistic director of Playwrights Horizons who now runs the Tent Theater with Aimée Hayes. We agreed that the show has activated a desire to go back and re-read Joyce.

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