Ibsen

A scene from Henrik Ibsen's play The Master Builder.

Ibsen is one of my favorite playwrights, for his uncanny ability to make characters "live" on stage.

Theatre critic, Hilton Als, says the following of The Master Builder, staged currently at the BAM's Harvey Theatre:

Power corrupts, but it can also bore. Like compulsive seducers, the unduly ambitious are the heroes of their own narratives, dogged, ruthless, and full of self-regard. Halvard Solness, the title character of Henrik Ibsen’s 1892 play “The Master Builder,” is a portrait of something, but of what? To say simply that the aging, legendary, but still competitive architect embodies cold determination and raging avarice is to ignore the ways in which Solness shape-shifts in the play’s atmosphere of supernatural realism. For at least half the drama, Solness is his own most interesting idea. He wants to be more than a man, but not a god—that would mean that he wasn’t part of the action. When Solness, who is unhappily married, becomes bewitched by an uncanny young woman named Hilde Wangel, we learn something else about him: within his desire, he is a perverse, lovesick, liminal being [...] Solness is many things at once, although he tries not to be: he represses much of his character in order to become a successful brand—the master architect—in the eyes of a public that’s more fascinated by the myth of heroic male creativity than by its complicated, internal reality.

The salesman dies twice

Death of a Salesman: Willy Loman, for all his fervent dreams of the future and his fierce argument with the past, never, ever, occupies his present. Even as he fights, fumes and flounders, he is sensationally absent from his life, a kind of living ghost. It is existence itself, not success, that eludes him. He inhabits a vast, restless, awful, and awesome isolation, which is both his folly and his tragedy.

Jackie and Ann

The 2004 Austrian Nobel Prize winner and agoraphobic, Elfriede Jelinek has written a monologue from the point of view of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The play is Jackie.

The New Yorker Magazine describes the play's heroine as witty, fun, funny, catty, and a paranoid nut job.

Jackie riffs for eighty minutes on the pleasures and horrors of being a Kennedy icon, and on death. Jackie is shown to drag around dummies emblazoned with the names Jack, Bobby and Ari.

Holland Taylor plays the role of former Texas Governor and famous alcoholic Ann Richards, in a new play Ann. Holland has also composed the play.

Richards was governor from 1991 to 1995 and died in 2006. She had once barked at President Bill Clinton, saying "I'm as strong as mustard gas." She is best remembered for her salty, down-home wit, and the play, according to critics, spills over with her indelible gumption, as Texan and tangy as barbecue sauce.

Jackie and Ann, both powerful women, not in the simple sense of being in positions of power, but in the broader sense of displaying the strength and courage of individuality and the humility of being fallible at the same time.

Reclaiming Hindu symbols

The play Ganesh Versus The Third Reich first played in Melbourne, Australia. The theme is seemingly simple: a Hindu effort to reclaim the Swastika, a sacred symbol of Hinduism, from the association it has had with the Nazis.

The play is directed by an Australian playwright, Bruce Gladwin, and had an all-Australian cast in its inaugural showing.

Backstage magazine writes up a favorable review of the play, as it opens in New York.

Timon of Athens

When I read Shakespeare's Timon of Athens for the first time, I thought it was too loud to be Shakespearean. 

The play could have come out of a Bollywood studio, so shallow it's storyline was and so bombastic were its dialogues.

Theatre critic John Lahr points out the un Shakespearean traits of Timon well:

The play in which the well-heeled Timon gives away so much money to his so-called friends that he ruins himself, can't decide if it's a comedy or a tragedy; its characters have humors but lack depth; the plot is thin, with few dramatic reversals, and Timon's trajectory from philanthropy to misanthropy is a precipitous straight line. 

There is a saying that Shakespeare was a bit embarrassed about staging Timon. It was thus never staged during his lifetime.

Perhaps it was the subject matter that made the play ahead of its time. As Lahr praises a recent revival of the play by London's National Theatre, he makes it look like Timon was written for a time of global economic meltdown. 

The play opens with an onstage replica of the tents of the Occupy London protesters, and ends with a view of the logo of HSBC, the bank that was caught laundering money for Mexican drug cartels and Middle Eastern terrorists.

According to Lahr:

In its gaudy shadows, Timon's tale of collapse catches not only the fragility of the British economy but the unnerving immanence of the collapse of its ruling elite.

Shakespeare must have written a recession play in an era when economic systems were in a very nascent stage.

Manic Maids

Jean Genet's The Maids is an eerie play.

Genet wrote the play in 1947.

The play is being currently staged on Broadway (at the Red Bull Theatre) and an apt one-line teaser for the play goes thus: "When the Madam's away, the maids play..."

And what a play the maids play! The description of Genet's play-within-the-play is as follows:

Claire and Solange are maids, sick to the gullet of being scuffed under the heels of their lady mistress. In a twisted evening of power-shifting role play, the two girls bite and scratch at one another in a vicious struggle to the top – a ritualistic tug-of-war which must finally end in silence or in sacrifice.

A turbulent exploration of the games we play, this classic French play was written by Jean Genet, a controversial figure whose work was subsequently banned in Australia and elsewhere around the world. Considered by many to be his finest and most monstrous creations, Genet’s naughty maids allow him to aim the barrel at class, criminality, sex and power.

The ritualistic game that the maids of the upper-class French socialite play, allow the humiliated and the subordinated of society to exorcise the ghosts of these burdens. The exorcism rituals are reminiscent of the "games" slaves used to play, especially in Francophone colonies of the Caribbean Island, like Haiti. The slaves, it is said, would suffer abjection throughout the day and at night, the off-duty servants would role-play. Some would play masters while others would play the slaves and the former would subject the latter to the horrors that they themselves would be subjected to in real life. This was a survival kit for the slaves. Pent-up anger and a pervasive sense of powerlessness is best expended in play.