Hamlet Goes it Alone at the Classical Theatre Company

Guy Robertson in One Man Hamlet
Photo by Anthony Robins

Houston's Classical Theatre Company aims to expand your idea of the classics. With The Merchant of Venice performed by prisoners in a concentration camp, and an Antigone that explored the rule of law as rule of religion, the troupe defines itself by shaking up a treasured genre. Next up is its One Man Hamlet, adapted and performed by Guy Roberts. John Johnston, Classical Theatre's artistic director, founder and co-director of One Man Hamlet clues us in.

29-95. What is the Classic Theatre Company's mission?

John Johnston: Our motto is boldly re-envisioning classical drama.

29-95: What defines theater as classical?

JJ: Anything 100 years old or older.

29-95: And your approach?

JJ: We are not putting the classics on display. We try to create a personal experience for the audience. We also play in small, intimate spaces.

29-95: How did you come upon One Man Hamlet?

JJ: It's a piece adapted and performed by Guy Roberts, artistic director of the Prague Shakespeare Festival. He's from Houston, and was here for the Houston Shakespeare Festival. He kindly agreed to stay and do this show. It's his baby. He also did it in Prague.

29-95: I can see how the concept makes sense. Hamlet has to be the most it's all about me character in the history of theater. He's the poster boy for narcissism. I wonder why Shakespeare didn't get the one-man idea. Where do we find your moody prince?

JJ: In an insane asylum under observation.

29-95: Shrinks love to weigh on Hamlet's particular brand of mental illness, and everyone loves a literary nut, so I can see that choice. Yet, it's a curious point of view, because it's Hamlet who sleuths about, over-observing everyone else.

JJ: Absolutely. He knows he is performing for an observing group of doctors. In a lot of ways Hamlet is a play about being observed and observing others. For example, the character Polonius is constantly spying on Hamlet (which in the end gets him killed), and Hamlet himself sets up The Mousetrap Scene to observe his murderous uncle's actions. In this adaptation of the play, we amplify the observation. Hamlet is under a microscope, and his actions and reactions and interactions are at the forefront of our conceit.

29-95: Isn't Hamlet already a one-man play of sorts?

JJ: Hamlet is a play about a character who is indeed totally alone. Even his closest friends are kept at arm's length (and some sent to their deaths). The only character that Hamlet trusts and confides in truly is the audience. Hamlet is a loner, and at risk of exploiting an overused term: a maverick. It is no coincidence that this play has so frequently been converted into a one-man adaptation. It just lends itself in that direction.

29-95: How ever does one man accomplish Ophelia's scenes?

JJ: By the blessed fact that Guy possesses extraordinary abilities. He weaves back and forth between different characters. He also has some basic props like a cot, a sink and some industrial chairs. With that we are able to create Hamlet's world.

29-95: Are you messing around with time?

JJ: No, not really. The feeling is contemporary, but there aren't any period references; Hamlet doesn't have an iPod.

29-95: Glad to hear that. I think we have all seen enough of Shakespeare roaming about history. There's still the problem of the mounting body count in the show. How does Roberts deal with that?

JJ: Hamlet, the patient, is obsessed with words, so that he constantly writing words all over the stage. When a character is killed he writes their name on the floor.

Classical Theatre Company presents One Man Hamlet, adapted and performed by Guy Roberts, based on the play by William Shakespeare, directed by Guy Roberts and John Johnston. October 8-18 at HITS Theatre, 311 West 18th Street. $15; $7 for students and seniors.

Reprinted from 29-95.com.

Review: Night of the Giant

Jennifer Decker and Amy Warren in Mildred's Umbrella's production of Night of the Giant by John Harvey
Photo by Anthony Rathbun

Kafka was quoted as saying a good novel should be like a blow to the head. Then John Harvey’s new play, Night of the Giant, produced by Mildred’s Umbrella, is at least a blunt object to the frontal cortex. It’s not an easy ride, but one to ponder, wrestle with and puzzle through with all your literary faculties in the ready position.

The play opens with fraternal twins Barbara and Clare, who never quite got over causing their beautiful mother’s death in childbirth, holding their father hostage in their decaying living room. Dad or “It,” bound and hooded, slithers about like a captive pet, while the sisters babble fantasies of their royal lineage. Like a pair of Mrs. Haversham’s distant cousins, they are determined to relive the past and remake the future in a kind of call and response banter.

The two retell the tale of their deformed brother James, their father’s nasty habit of fashioning playmates for James through unspeakable acts, and their eventual choice to bag up James in a dumpster. They tell their tale like a nightly re-enactment ritual. Eventually, the truth comes out and it’s not pretty, but nor is it a garden variety of violence—more the stuff of nightmares and mythology. Think Brothers Grimm, but grimmer.

The three-person cast completely understands Harvey’s idiosyncratic approach to language, which is both formal and detached. Jennifer Decker imbues Claire with a bewitching clarity and shrewd determination. Amy Warren gives Barbara, the softer sister, a wonderful loony edge. She is positively diabolical when she polishes a new light bulb, a hilarious choice considering her housekeeping skills. Decker and Warren’s chemistry provides stability in Harvey’s wildly meandering script. Walt Zipprian as Joe/Dad/It spends the entire play with a burlap sack over his head and still manages to command the space.

Harvey directs with a disciplined hand, letting the more formal notes push to the center. There’s a musicality in his phrasing, which makes perfect sense as a small chamber orchestra sits slightly off to the side, making the setting all the more weird. According to Barbara, it’s a gift to dad who asked for music. What a gal. Elliot Cole’s original score adds a melancholic splendor—somber, nostalgic, and just beautiful enough to lure the listener into this sordid world. The fine orchestra included Melody Yenn (cello), Amanda Witt (clarinet), Lauren Winterbottom (oboe), Molly Marcuson (recorded harp) and Cole on harmonium.

Wayne Barnhill creates a disturbingly squalid living room that feels just plopped down. The play could be placed anywhere like a portable snow globe, largely due to Barnhill’s sense of no boundaries. In fact, Mildred’s Umbrella performed Night of the Giant in three venues. Ratty furniture, an empty bird cage with feathers strewn about and a side table crafted from what looks like old chicken bones conjure a world where something terrible just happened the moment before the lights went up. It’s a fragile world, as if one exhale could turn this whole cosmos into ashes. Kelly Robertson cleverly costumes Claire in a soiled prom dress and Barbara in a 1940s suit complete with a dead animal fur stole. Kevin Taylor’s lighting design blurs the edges just enough to keep us squirming in our seats.

So what do to with this material? You can go on a paradox scavenger hunt: there are gory details told in formal prose, a sense of claustrophobia with no clear container and an unsettling aftertaste soothed by haunting music. You can take the lit-wonk approach and mine influences of various creation myths and the seminal work of Pinter, Beckett and their gang. Harvey also mentions influences from Jose Donoso’s Obscene Bird of Night and Tom Wait’s Alice in his program note. The nod to Martin McDonagh’s work, specicially, The Pillowman, is ever present. That will keep you busy as Harvey operates with a considerable arsenal of references at his disposal. Or you can enjoy the play as a new chapter in Gothic theater, gruesome but strangely compelling and funny, if you allow yourself to see its glorious, absurd contours.

I prefer to look at Harvey’s play in its broad strokes. Who could deny a certain timeliness in a looking at people who take every ounce of their energy to believe false truths in the “news as fiction” era that we have all grown so complacent with. A volatile world held together by a threadbare promise of two disillusioned characters seems a familiar scenario. Don’t societies bag up their crimes all the time?

The lights go down as Barbara and Claire sew dear old dad in a bag, and in a final moment of unity, face each other with ultimate resolve to contain the truth as they know it. Night of the Giant isn’t exactly a play you would want to follow you home down the narrow, dimly lit back alley of your psyche, but chances are, it will anyway.

Reprinted from Houston ArtsWeek.

Music and Motion: A conversation with Richard Alston

Photo by Dee Conway

Richard Alston Dance Company, London's leading contemporary dance troupe, makes its first stop in Houston. After serving as artistic director of Ballet Rambert, Alston founded his company in 1994. Currently, he also serves as artistic director of The Place, a groundbreaking dance education institution. Alston introduces us to his work below.


Dance Source Houston: What can we expect from a Richard Alston dance?

Richard Alston: There's always this relationship between the dance and the music. I don't think you need to lean on it, but music supports the body. When I worked with Merce we used to rehearse in silence. He made that choice, but he also freed me to make my own choices.


DSH: That make sense seeing you have a show filled with musical giants, like Phillip Glass, Igor Stravinsky and John Sebastian Bach. What attracted you to Glass' "Songs from Liquid Days" for your work Blow Over?

RA: I have seen so many dances to Glass over the years. His work is associated with dance. I enjoy the mix of grandeur and the jazz/pop voices, of Suzanne Vega, David Byrne and Paul Simon. We have added a new Byrne song, "Open the Kingdom" and Houston will be first to see that. I find that the voice is so direct, and I like working with many layered elements. It's like a Handel anthem, very grand.


DSH: Movements from Petrushka seems timely in light of the Diaghilev celebration.

RA: I made the piece in 1994, but it made sense to revive the work now. Liz Reed created the costumes after Alexander Benois, who created the designs for the original piece. I like to have live music as often as possible. The pianist will be both live and on stage.


DSH: I found it fascinating that you worked with Merce Cunningham during the 1970s.

RA: Of course, Merce was a huge influence, but so were the release-based techniques. Steve Paxton was here you know. I worked closely with Frederick Ashton. I love the detail in Ashton's ballets. He is a kindred spirit.

DSH: I found your dancers so light, yet fully grounded. They are truly an embodied bunch. What do you look for in a dancer?

RA: I am glad you noticed that. Yes, I am interested in a deep physicality and flowing movement. But I love lightness too; I call it flying. They need to be very articulate dancers who challenge themselves. They also have to be really musical; we call it singing. They need to internalize the music. I loved Margot Fonteyn, she was that kind of dancer. I also like people with individual personalities. I don't want a company where everyone looks the same. We come in all different shapes and sizes.

DSH: It's quite an international group.

RA: I like that and pursue it.

DSH: There's one piece on the program by Martin Lawrence, your rehearsal director.

RA We are not turning into a rep company. Martin danced with the company for 15 years, and I am glad he can develop his own voice here. We sing from the same hymn book. Martin's piece is fast and joyful, a very uplifting piece.


DSH: You mention your appreciation of Henry Moore's work and have had a considerable amount of training in the visual arts. How does your training inform your work?

RA: It taught me how to see. I have always had a sharp eye and have been attracted to three dimensional sculptural ideas, so there's a touchable volume in my work stems from that experience. It's like a Henry Moore piece but moving all over the place.

DSH: The Place looks like a model for dance education.

RA: It is pretty unique to combine the intensity of a professional studio with an academic program. We also have a small theater. As the resident company, we are in a privileged position in that post grads who have apprenticed with the company, while some of my senior dancers have been able to work on their masters degrees.

DSH: How would you describe the current health of the dance field in the UK?

RA: The credit crunch has hit everyone, yet there's this amazing amount of activity going one. We get to see a lot of European dance here as well. Dance is full of resilient people. So it's steady. It's good.


The Society for the Performing Arts presents the Richard Alston Dance Company on Friday, October 16 at 8 PM at Wortham Center's Cullen Theater. Call 713-227-4SPA or visit www.spahouston.org

Reprinted from Dance Source Houston.

Review: Main Street Theater The House of the Spirits

Chelsea Ryan McCurdy and Eva De La Cruz
Photo by RickOrnel Productions

Caridad Svich’s The House of the Spirits is a noble adaptation of award-winning Chilean author Isabel Allende’s classic novel. Svich’s play doesn’t completely capture the essence of Allende’s enchanting use of magical realism, but she creates a compelling theatrical experience, such that, by the second act, I was hardly missing Allende’s delicate prose. Svich also distills Allende’s massive epic into a workable story.

The House of the Spirits chronicles the ups and downs of the Trueba family in an un-named Latin American Country spanning 1920 through the 1970s. Unlike the book, Svich uses Alba, the youngest member of the Trueba tribe, as the sole narrator, lending a cohesive dramatic thread that works well to bring us in and through the multiple frames of reference found in Allende’s dense writing.

The cast—all strong—is headed up by Sean Patrick Judge, who lends a quiet dignity to Esteban Trueba, a difficult and complex man. Judge gives Esteban a brutal edge and, as he ages, a somber tenderness. Laura Michelle Salas imbues the young Alba with a slight aura of distance, serving to separate her from the brutality of her torture and imprisonment, and sustaining a cool detachment of the storyteller. When she finally enters the action of the play, Salas adds warmth and resolve. Eva De La Cruz’s Clara matures from a magical child to tolerant wife with believability. Luisa Amaral-Smith plays several roles, but is most powerful in her portrayal of Ferula, Esteban’s long-suffering sister.

Rebecca Greene Udden directs with a soft hand, letting the story unfold in its own timing. Nothing feels forced or rushed; it’s a graceful production. Jodi Bobrovsky conjures a lacy all white world, lending a sense of understated elegance. David Gipson’s lighting design add just enough otherworldliness for us to feel thoroughly transported.

Reprinted from Houston ArtsWeek.

Ain Gordon Tells a Forgotten Story

Ain Gordon, three-time Obie Award-winner, premieres his one-woman play, A Disaster Begins, at DiverseWorks this weekend, which chronicles the story behind the story of the 1900 Galveston flood. Gordon serves as co-director of the Pick-Up Performance Co(S.), artist-in-residence at the Center for Creative Research and a core writer of the Playwright's Center in Minneapolis. The New York-based playwright popped by for a quick chat.

29-95: What brought you to Galveston's great storm?

Ain Gordon: My interest began in the disaster book industry, which preceded silent films. The American public couldn't get these gory details any other way. I was initially thinking of doing a story about the San Francisco earthquake, but then I found a copy of Muriel Halstead's novel, The Galveston Flood, in a flea market for $3 with the cover ripped off. In Halstead I found a woman I could write about.

29-95: So what happened to the disaster book industry?

AG: It crashed.

29-95: Your work is new to Houston audiences. What kind of stories do you want to tell?

AG: Biting, forgotten and marginalized stories that America doesn't want to tell. There are complicated truths of the 1900 storm. It was the worst natural disaster in American history. It's shockingly un-present in our history.

29-95: We are a culture of amnesia.

AG: The storm is a platform for discussing America's penchant for forgetting wars and storms, then we do it all again.

29-95: Set up the scene for us.

AG: Muriel Halstead (played by Veanne Cox) finds herself in middle age and at the disaster book industry's low-end lecture circuit, where she is to deliver a talk on the Galveston flood. She sets out to give a perfectly normal lecture until she finds herself unable to accept that complacency, wanting something else, to tell all the topical tentacles, to tell the real truth of the flood, to include her personal disaster within the natural one. It's as much a story about how this story gets told and how she comes to write this book, which eventually gets downgraded with a sensationalist cover. Where does a disaster begin?

29-95: Floods wash things up. Look at Katrina, even Ike. What did the 1900 flood wash up?

AG: We were in the midst of the falsely declared Spanish American war, like Iraq, so we were busy looking at disasters somewhere else ignoring the one on our shores. She gives a personalized history of disappointed men who wanted to build in places that were unsustainable.

29-95: Tell me about it. Houston is one big and ever expanding flood plane. How did your play end up opening here to Houston, of all hurricane prone places, never mind its proximity to Galveston?

AG: Sixto Wagan (DiverseWorks co-director) came to a reading. He came up to me immediately afterwards to say he wanted to bring it to Houston.

29-95: When you lose 1/3 of a city's population like Galveston did, the disaster has an enormous longevity and defines the city. And here we are at the anniversary of Ike. What are your thoughts about the timing of your play?

AG: I have fears. There's no blame being laid out, it's an American cycle. Can we get off that cycle?

29-95: How did your path cross with Veanne Cox, who plays the lead character in your one-woman show? She was terrific in Caroline or Change on Broadway.

AG: I've encountered Veanne over the years; she did a reading of a play of mine, and I loved her in it. I always wanted to work with her, so she was at the top of my list for the part. She's an aggressively smart actress who is going to chew up the many things the character is thinking.

29-95: Since I hark from the dance world, you are not going to get out of talking about your famous father, David Gordon, one of my all-time favorite dance theater artists. How did growing up in and around dance shape your approach?

AG: Certainly there's an influence from both my parents, in that I am more interested in character and people and much less interested in story. Dancers have an emotive story, you have the narrative implication, the non-linear story. That is from the dance world.

DiverseWorks presents A Disaster Begins by Ain Gordon, A Pick Up Performance Co (S.) production co-commissioned by DiverseWorks. 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday at DiverseWorks. Every performance is pay what you want.

Reprinted from 29-95.com