THEATER REVIEW: THE CRADLE WILL ROCK

A scene from The Cradle Will Rock.

This beat goes on

By Ed Rampell

Don’t miss The Cradle Will Rock. The Blank Theatre Company’s production of this proletarian theater classic is as timely today as it was when Marc Blitzstein’s musical premiered – uh, eventually – on Broadway during the last Depression, emerging out of a wave of working class organizing and sitdown strikes. Now, during the current Depression, workers in Wisconsin, Ohio and beyond are resisting attempts to overturn labor’s historic gains made during the New Deal such as collective bargaining, just as the masses are rising against tyranny across North Africa and the Western Asia.

The Cradle Will Rock opens with Tiffany C. Adams’ sultry streetwalker Moll trying to hustle a potential john, as they dicker over prices in Steeltown, USA. Adams delivers a moving, soulful rendition of Nickel Under the Foot, which inspired German playwright Bertolt Brecht to tell Blitzstein he should write an entire musical around this song, according to Eric Gordon’s Blitzstein biography Mark the Music (which, along with a CD of the score by the cast of the Blank’s 1995 Cradle production, is on sale at the Stella Adler Theatre). Adams (who, appropriately, hails from Toledo, Ohio, site of the 1934 mass strike co-led by A.J. Muste) holds her own as Moll, a role that Broadway luminary Patti LuPone has played on New York and London stages.

Adams’ hooker serves as a recurring leitmotif throughout the musical for the prostitution that the capitalist system forces many characters into. These include members of the Tea Party-like “Liberty Committee,” which industrialist Mr. Mister (Peter Van Doren reprises the role he first played in the Blank’s 1995 The Cradel Will Rock) and his “philanthropic” wife, Mrs. Mister (Gigi Bermingham), have recruited and bankroll to stem Steeltown’s rising tide of unionization. With great comic panache these sellouts depict what Karl Marx called “ruling class, ruling ideas,” just as Charlie Chaplin humorously portrayed Marx’s theory of the alienation of labor under an exploitive system in his 1936 masterpiece, Modern Times.

The portrayal of the Committee in this production skillfully and drolly directed by Blank Founder Daniel Henning verges on the Theatre of the Absurd, as the thesps skewer various members of the scientific, media, religious, academic and cultural elite: Dr. Specialist (Rob Roy Cesar), Editor Daily (David Trice), Reverend Salvation (Christopher Carroll), President Prexy (Matthew Patrick Davis) and musician Yasha (Jim Holdridge).

But can the Misters buy everyone? Have they met their match when they confront labor leader Larry Foreman (Rex Smith; back in 1937 Howard Da Silva originated the role)? Foreman sings the title number, and the rocking cradle refers to revolution, which American socialist Eugene V. Debs called, “The boldest word in an language.” When the stage explodes with mass revolt, the workers’ picket signs cleverly bear contemporary corporate references, as does the playbill’s cover.

The Cradle Will Rock was the number one “must see” play on my list of shows I hoped to experience one day. I missed it circa 1999 when it was presented at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum (Geer played Mr. Mister in the Broadway premiere). But Blank’s production not only doesn’t disappoint – it’s also well worth the wait. Henning’s humorous take on Blitzstein’s musical is surprisingly different from the version of it glimpsed in Tim Robbins’ stellar Cradle Will Rock (the best American feature film of 1999), which is more about the struggle to present the play than about the show itself, although scenes of the opera are glimpsed in rehearsal and performance sequences and seemingly more serious.

Except for a piano player tickling the ivories on stage right the current cast appears on a bare stage at the Stella Adler. Did scenic designer Kurt Boetcher botch the set design? Or is this a clever reference to the stirring events leading up to The Cradle Will Rock's 1937 Broadway debut – which, as Robbins revealed in his thoughtful movie, almost never occurred?

Almost 75 years later, as workers continue to fight for their rights, The Cradle Will Rock remains as relevant as ever. Rock on!


The Cradle Will Rock runs through March 20 at the Stella Adler Theatre, Main Stage, 6773 Hollywood Blvd., 2nd Floor, Hollywood, California, 90028. For more information: 323/661-9827; www.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/781235.

Read more

THEATER REVIEW: BREAK THE WHIP

Giselle Jones and Chris Schultz in Break the Whip. Photo by Christopher Ward.

A theatrical people’s history of the United States

By Ed Rampell

Add a quart of Commedia dell’ Arte masks, an epic cup of Brechtian alienation effects, a pint of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s biomechanics, a dash of Indonesian shadow puppetry, a tablespoon of Eugene Ionesco-esque Theatre of the Absurd, an ounce of African Djembe drumming, a soupcon of slide whistles and slapstick plus a gallon of radical politics, sprinkle liberally with Howard Zinn and Yogi Bear, stir vigorously over a high flame until boiling, and what do you get? A spicy recipe for theatrical gumbo and agitprop that only the Actors’ Gang chefs could whip up and serve -- and boy is this avant-garde troupe cooking with its new production, Break The Whip. 

Writer-director Tim Robbins’ new play is a theatrically rendered people’s history of what is now the United States, told from the point of view of the oppressed, of the not-so-wellborn common folk, of the indigenous, enslaved and indentured, instead of from the top down perspective of the hoity-toity, high and mighty. Nowadays there’s lots of anxiety among reactionaries that whites may become outnumbered by nonwhites in America, and Robbins’ sizzling story is set in a period when this was indeed the case: Shortly after the founding of the Jamestown settlement in Virginia, when Europeans were indeed a minority in a “New World” largely populated by indigenous tribal peoples, along with African slaves imported before the Mayflower. This combustible ethnic combination could be called “when worlds collide.” (Set on the East Coast in the early 17th century, Break the Whip doesn’t get into the Latino demographics of the Southwest -- that is another story.)

Break the Whip’s plot is fairly complex, especially as there are so many characters, and difficult to summarize. Suffice it to say that Break the Whip explores the class divisions between the English settlers, racial clashes between the Africans, Europeans and indigenous people, as well as tribalism among the latter. Quino (Chris Schultz) is an indentured servant who may have a same sex relationship with a lad who perishes during a famine sweeping Jamestown. Quino is outraged when the grave dug for the stricken boy is, instead, given to an upper class Englishwoman. In the second act Quino’s interracial romance with an African woman, Lumbine (the superb Giselle Jones), upends the racist colony and despite torture, leads to a desperate act of defiance that crowns the play, moving it along to its inexorable conclusion.

So how successful is the show, with its cast of 23 actors (many in multiple roles) in dramatizing history and making it entertaining instead of pedantic? The various special effects deployed by the Actors' Gang certainly enliven the production, which takes place on a bare stage, minus curtains or even dressing rooms, as cast members dress and undress on the side in the dark. The costumes designed by Christina Wright, from deer to bears, braves to slaves, highborn Englishmen to indentured servants, are eye catching. Creation myths are cleverly, amusingly depicted via wayang kulit (Indonesian shadow puppets projected on a screen, which the Actors' Gang also used to great effect a few years ago in its adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels). Fabrics of cloth denoting rivers are deftly deployed. The appearance of a spectral bear (Pierre Adeli) during Abooksigun’s (Jean-Louis Darville) vision quest is more Yogi Bear than spiritual talisman -- although, to be fair, while the clawed creature is cartoonish, he is indeed smarter than the average bear.

The chase scene in the second act, which is when the action picks up and the story really comes alive (the first act has lots of exposition), is extremely cinematically rendered, and one of the most exciting escape sequences seen onstage since Eliza fled slaver Simon Legree and his baying bloodhounds on the ice floes in productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

But the use of masks -- a Commedia Dell’ Arte convention -- by the entire ensemble throughout the production is eyebrow raising. These masks worked perfectly in the Actors' Gang’s 2003 anti-Iraq War gem, Embedded, but then Robbins’ was, in part, depicting public figures, such as Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld, whose faces were well known to audiences. However, in Break the Whip, fictional and obscure characters (by the way, Jamestown’s Pocahontas and John Smith don’t make special appearances here) are portrayed, and the masks deny the thespians much of their innate dramatic power, as spectators can’t see their faces, facial expressions and in many cases, even their eyes. As with the lack of a proscenium arch, Robbins may be using the masks to achieve Bertolt Brecht’s alienation technique in order to create a Lehrstuck (a teaching play) effect, wherein the illusion of theatrical naturalism and reality is shattered so, instead of empathizing with the characters, theatergoers are encouraged to think about them and the story instead. In other words, ticket buyers are prodded to use intellect instead of emotions to process the playwright’s lesson and perspective. If this is the case, one wonders if more is lost or gained in Break the Whip by disguising the actors’ faces and thereby diminishing their expressiveness.

Another point raised by an African-American woman who attended the premiere is that, apparently, few if any Native American actors play Paspahegh and Powatan roles. It seems that palefaces in “redface” and “blackface” (or mask, as the case may be) portray tribal and African characters. If so, is this perhaps perpetuating old stereotypes, with members of the dominant majority culture still controlling how minority ethnic groups are depicted? Los Angeles has a relatively large Native American population, and indigenous actresses such as Irene Bedard and Delanna Studi live within driving distance of the Actors' Gang’s Culver City theatre. If a play seeks to comment on injustices that subject peoples have been subjected to, it seems that those presenting the work should make extra efforts to include members of the maligned group in the cast.

On the other hand, you don’t necessarily have to be a chicken to know an egg. It’s a fair point that Marlon Brando, who wasn’t Italian, won a well-deserved Oscar for playing Don Corleone in 1972. At the time, some criticized The Godfather for caricaturing people of Italian ancestry as mobsters, yet Brando sent an indigenous woman, Sacheen Littlefeather, to decline his Academy Award due to Hollywood’s racist portrayal of Native Americans. So the issue of ethnic representation and misrepresentation remains extremely complicated and problematic.
An Academy Award-winning actor, Robbins has a cinematic sensibility, as well as a theatrical aesthetic, which he overall skillfully combines in Break the Whip. Above all, in this parable about colonial America, Robbins’ well known progressive politics win the day, with a rare depiction of a maroon community of escaped slaves and Natives, plus indentured whites, as the prototype of a “better future” for all Americans. But this elusive “Beloved Community” of equal rights for all is yet to be.

Break The Whip runs through Nov. 13 at the Actors’ Gang at the Ivy Substation theatre, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232. For more info: 310/838-GANG; www.theactorsgang.com





     

Read more

THEATER REVIEW: THE TRIAL OF THE CATONSVILLE NINE

The Actors’ Gang presents the gripping anti-Vietnam War drama

By Ed Rampell

The mood was set opening night when octogenarian author/activist Gore Vidal rolled up in his wheelchair to Tim Robbins at the Actors’ Gang’s theatre lobby, extending his hand to the troupe’s Artistic Director, intoning the word: “Solidarity.” Inside, in front of the stage, flanked by Robbins and Managing Director Elizabeth Doran, Vidal and another wheelchair warrior, Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, spoke out against today’s wars before the curtain rose for the evening’s play.

The Trial of the Catonsville Nine is a dramatization of one of the most celebrated acts of resistance against the Vietnam War, which Vidal had been a vocal opponent of. Six years ago this February, at a Sunset Blvd. rally Vidal also spoke out against the then-impending invasion of Iraq as part of the largest mass demonstrations in human history. Robbins, too, publicly opposed attacking Baghdad, and so, in a sense we have gone full circle from Indochina to Iraq -- although the imperial swan song unfortunately remains the same.

While French students and workers revolted in that merry month of May 1968, two priests, Daniel (Andrew E. Wheeler) and Philip Berrigan (Scott Harris), and seven other Catholic activists forced their way into Local Board 33’s selective service office in Catonsville, Maryland, seized 378 draft files and proceeded to burn the records.

The play opens with a pantomiming of this defiant action, while the rest of the production is largely Daniel's free verse dramatization of the court case against the zealous defendants, who came to be called the Catonsville Nine and to help rally the growing movement against the Vietnam War, lending the cause a spiritual dimension.

Like Philip, Daniel has been an apostle of nonviolent civil disobedience, a righteous leader fighting the good fight in the prophetic, liberation theology tradition of the “worker priest” movement. Although it is true that Daniel is indeed a poet and writer, he is first and foremost an agitator for social justice and peace -- indeed, he’s believed to be the “radical priest” Paul Simon refers to in "Me and Julio Down By the School Yard." So Daniel’s 1971 adaptation of the verbally rich trial transcripts are primarily by an activist interested in persuading audiences with a work of agitprop intended to inform and inspire action, not to entertain. Daniel is a prophet first, priest second and playwright third.
A trained bard with a deep dramaturgical background might have been able to take the court’s transcripts and turn the words into theatrical action to be performed on the boards. This was far easier with that other celebrated sixties’ court case, the Chicago 7/8, which was filled with many moments of low comedy, thanks largely to the Yippie antics of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and moments of high drama provided in particular by Bobby Seale, whose demands to represent himself led, unbelievably, to the Black Panther being bound and gagged by the judge. But the Catonsville Nine’s courtroom proceedings had neither the vaudevillian panache or Shakespearian tragedy of their Chicago brethren’s trial. Whereas Daniel’s closing words after the verdict is pronounced are: “This is the greatest day of our lives,” Rubin, with his usual pop cultural flair, likened being one of the Chicago 7/8 defendants to “winning the Academy Award” of activism.

A key commandment of writing for stage and screen is: “Don’t tell me; show me.” The playwright needs to bring the words alive with passion and action. Daniel, however, is more interested in delivering a sermon of the stage that will move the audience to take action against evil, and his rewriting of the trial transcripts results in a play that seems at times to be talky.

But having said that, what wonderful words they are, spoken with great passion and conviction, clarion calls Americans so desperately need to hear today -- and one may add, words expertly delivered by the Actors’ Gang. The dialogue, at times, is poetic, tackling the great moral questions of existence that are the basis of all great art. The ethereal Daniel asks: “What would it mean to be a Catholic” in 1968 America. At times, it’s as if the words tumble off of angels’ tongues or Gabriel is sounding his horn. Philip tells the court the Nine took action “to bear witness, first by blood, then by fire.”

Much to the chagrin of the beleaguered judge (Adele Robbins) the various defendants try to explain how different facets of Washington’s foreign and domestic policy – the CIA overthrow of Guatemala’s reformist Arbenz government (which led Che Guevara to join Castro’s guerrillas), the apartheid-like treatment of blacks at home, you name it – drove them to their civil disobedience. But nothing is more moving than the description of napalm, the burning jelly that indiscriminately burnt women and children, as well as Viet Cong. Stepping into the lion’s den, Daniel declares that the defendants acted “to save the innocent from death by fire.” Another member of the Nine declares: “I wanted to let people live.” One of the two female defendants explains: “I want to celebrate life, not death.”

The Catonsville Nine were true Christians, not the phony kind that had backed George W. Bush and his bloodthirsty wars. (A difference between Vietnam and Iraq is that President Lyndon Johnson claimed he was fighting communists. Bush’s main rationale for attacking Iraq was those fictional Weapons of Mass Destruction that never materialized. Whether one agreed with LBJ or not, at least it was true that there were indeed communists in Indochina.) If you want to see real Christians, look no farther than the Berrigan brothers and their acolytes, not those phony baloney backers of Sarah Palin and John McCain, who has made a career out of being a war criminal, attacking a country that never posed a military threat to our borders.

Sibyl Wickersheimer’s set design literally sets the stage for this play: a huge flag hangs from the ceiling, with a parachute behind it. (Wait till you see what these “un-Americans” do with Old Glory!) The sparse set’s seats, etc., are sometimes suggestive of a courtroom, at other time of the pews of a church, which is what one suspects the Berrigans hoped to turn the courthouse into, as they bore witness against the war machine and its lackey, the judicial system.

The skilled, tireless actors perform admirably in multiple roles, alternating between playing defendants, witnesses, attorneys, prosecutors, et al, as the ensemble troupe rousingly brings alive a history that is, alas, still very much with us. For this reason, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine remains very topical and a must see, as the war in Iraq drags on and the Obama administration plans its Afghan surge, while beefing up military spending.

In its agony, ecstasy and glory, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine dares to remind us that at the core of the Judeo-Christian ethic is the edict that, from Hanoi to Baghdad to Kabul to Gaza, “thou shall not kill.”

The Trial of the Catonsville Nine plays at the Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 p.m. and Sundays at 2:00 p.m. through March 21. For more info call 310/838-GANG or log onto www.theactorsgang.com.

Read more