Tag: Walter Bobbie

… triple play …

What a romp! What sheer fun! Moliere would have loved The School For Lies.

And what a record, three for three, for Classic Stage and David Ives:

2009: Classic Stage produces Ives’ brilliant play about Spinoza, New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza
2010: Classic Stage produces Ives’ Venus in Fur which was a big success and launched Nina Arianda into stardom (though I found it tiresome)
2011: Classic Stage produces Ives’ The School for Lies, from Moliere’s The Misanthrope, and they’re right back on brilliant

The School for Lies roughly follows Moliere’s The Misanthrope with Ives translating it into the words, rhythms, and catch-all phrases of today’s youth-slanted English — and these are very young characters. He’s discovered complete freedom of vocabulary — no word for word translation but every attempt, and success, at catching the sense of each line, its feeling, the characters’ pleasure in saying it and the impact on the hearer.

The effect in its way is pure Moliere. Ives bridges the 17th to 21st Centuries!

And, though perhaps less inventive, Ives is as witty as Moliere! Like The Misanthrope, The School for Lies is in rhyme — rhyming couplets, strings of internal rhymes, can-you-top-this? rhymes, punning rhymes, delayed rhymes that you wait for and that never disappoint on arrival — bringing a grin, a chortle, a guffaw, and a sigh of satisfaction.

We’re in Paris among aristocrats in the 17th Century. Well, we’re sort of there: the furnishings are of the time, and the characters wear gorgeous period costumes but they talk like us. Celimene is a spirited, witty recent widow and a flirt who loves society. Frank is an impulsive, sarcastic brooder, disdainful of humanity and its superficial social conventions — hugs in particular. He’s sort of a hippie, she’s a party girl, and yet they love, sparring like Annie and Frank in Annie Get Your Gun. The play abounds with rich characters, Philante, Frank’s friend with the “be reasonable, Frank” message who turns into a Queen ex machina; Clitander (fun and names) super rich and content with his stupidity; Oronte, whose dreadful poetry bears the brunt of Frank being frank, and others to entangle themselves in each others’ lies and loves.

This is a cast with great comic timing and marvelous expressions — subtle and broad as needed — Jenn Gambatese is particularly amusing as Elainte who loves … well, everybody here loves a few different people. The tall, tousled Hamish Linklater gives a vigorous and always humorous performance and he’s handsome so that we can believe Celimene falls in love with him against her better judgment. Mamie Gummer is persuasive as Celimene though the role could use more sparkle. Everybody’s good but I’d particularly mention Steven Boyer whose long-suffering deadpan in the role of two servants holds the play together — you’d think that particularl joke that goes along with him might be overdone, but it works every time.

I’ve seen The Misanthrope at the Pearl Theatre recently which prompts comparison: the stories and characters are similar but the differences are interesting — though I was so captivated by The School for Lies that these took awhile to sink in. In The School for Lies, the hero, Frank, speaks of his hatred of hypocrisy. In The Misanthrope, the parallel hero, Alceste, hates hypocrisy and injustice. And therein lies a tale. The School for Lies is focused on individuals, on the foibles of this group and the hilarity they engender. Injustice looms larger in The Misanthrope where, for all the laughter, one is always aware of the great power imbalances of the social structure and the insecurities they cause. All in all, The School for Lies is a less political play than The Misanthrope. In a way this is surprising, since Moliere, living and writing under the tight reign of Louis XIV, had two of his plays banned by the government, while Ives has nothing to lose.

(And those court cases often referred to are totally unclear to me in both plays.)

And Moliere’s play, for all of its exaggerated characterizations, is more realistic in terms of personalities and relationships, particularly in the more complex, anguished and genuinely philosophical character of Alceste, now Frank in The School for Lies. And speaking of realism, Frank impossibly turns out to be someone else — but it’s so wonderfully funny you wouldn’t want it any other way. These aspects give Moliere’s play the universality that inspires interpretations, adaptations, performances and other kinds of conversations with it in new generations — like The School for Lies. But The School for Lies has its own great wit and language.

The School for Lies plays at Classic Stage in NYC’s East Village through May 22; that’s too short a run for such an enjoyable play!

Review | Venus in Fur by David Ives | Directed by Walter Bobbie | With Nina Arianda and Wes Bentley | Classic Stage Company

By Yvonne Korshak

On January 21, 2010

In Off-Broadway Theater

… SM …

The Marquis de Sade died in 1814, which left over half a century for sadism to languish alone until masochism “arrived” in the 1870 erotic novel Venus in Furs — the author’s name, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, providing the word.

Ives’ play Venus in Fur roughly follows the extreme SM relationship between the man and woman in the novel, which allows for plenty of sadism, masochism, and a beautiful woman in Victoria’s Secret type of lingerie tempting and teasing a man. Voyeurism, sexual revelation, sanctified by touches of social history and the “serious” overtones of a “classic novel” — you can see why someone thought this would be a good play to produce. The play’s repetitive quality and predictability, and — a casting problem — a total lack of chemistry between the actors playing the man and woman, make it boring.

A young writer has spent the day auditioning women for his first play. That he instead of the director is holding the auditions introduces a sense of authorial fantasy. He’s closing up shop when a pushy blond woman thrust herself into his grungy office and insists on reading for the part. Thomas is impatient, wants to get home to his girlfriend but Vanda won’t take no for an answer. She’s not on the list for readings — her agent’s error, she insists (though it enhances the “is it real?” sense), and keeps talking. Eventually she badgers him into letting her read for the part while making him read the male character’s lines.

From her first lines, she’s transformed from a street-wise, ordinary girl with a New York accent to the upper class 19th century countess she’s portraying. She insists that he not merely mouth his lines but really play the part, thus enmeshing him in the archetypal slave and master relationship, with him the slave, that he’s written into the play and, through that, the “real” one with her. They switch back and forth between play acting and being real, between their ordinary personae and the high class SM characters he’s written into his play; with each switch, their power dynamic takes a further step toward reversal. At the start, he’s in charge, auditioning, choosing: by the end, victim and victor have changed places, and sexes.

In its criss-crossing of power arcs, Venus in Fur recalls Amiri Baraka’s (LeRoi Jones) Dutchman of 1964, seen in a recent revival at the Cherry Lane Theater, but whereas in Dutchman, in a similarly locked space, Blacks rise from victims to victors, here it’s the politics of feminism.

In contrast to the Obie award winning Dutchman, however, Venus in Fur doesn’t crackle and move with devastating speed toward a brilliant and unexpected denouement. It repeats itself as it lurches toward a predictable ending. Oh not again, one says to oneself (at least that’s what I said to myself, can’t speak for the rest of the audience) as the tall, shapely, and dramatically strong Nina Arianda once again takes off her street clothes to reveal her sexy black lingerie, or Victorian ruffles, or puts them on again, or off again, or on … I thought she had a lot of stamina for changing clothes. So much of this play is what the woman is wearing. A move to boots could be called the play’s preliminary climax. Wow! Black boots. Sensuality and sexual dynamics are in the line of sight but not in the air.

Venus in Fur plays at Classic Stage, on East 13th Street in NYC, through February 21.

Wes Bentley and Nina Arianda in Venus in Fur take a close look at Sacher-Masoch’s well-thumbed novel. Photo courtesy of Classic Stage Company

Yvonne Korshak reviews Off-Broadway, Broadway, Film and Art

Tag: Walter Bobbie

Review | The School For Lies by David Ives | Directed by Walter Bobbie | Classic Stage Company

Review | Venus in Fur by David Ives | Directed by Walter Bobbie | With Nina Arianda and Wes Bentley | Classic Stage Company