Posts Tagged ‘A Noise Within’

http://www.vimeo.com/6036606When John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World first opened at Dublin’s famous Abbey Theatre in 1907, riots erupted amongst the crowd mid-performance, forcing the actors to pantomime a good portion of the third act. Now while it may be less than surprising to hear about Irish rioting, Playboy was met with similar reactions in both New York and Philadelphia, the latter of which saw the entire company get arrested for putting on an immoral performance.

The play—a brashly violent, romantic, and yet comic tale about patricide, adultery, and general immorality among peasants—is now considered to be Synge’s masterpiece, having spurned two film adaptations, numerous revivals, and even one musical. As for the kind of explosive anarchy the show incited upon its early performances…that hasn’t happened for a long time.

Come Sunday, April 11^th, however, at A Noise Within, the only Southern California repertory company specializing in classical theatre, the riots may reemerge. It’s ‘Pay What You Can’ night, allowing anybody and everybody to simply pay what they can afford to see the company’s newest production of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. Directed by company co-founder Geoff Elliott (who also plays the protagonist’s father in the play), and starring Michael A. Newcomer, Lindsay Gould, Apollo Dukakis, Brian Hostenske, and Jill Hill, the 7 PM show promises to be a riot (if, indeed, not a riot-provoking one). But make sure to arrive early, because the ‘Pay What You Can’ tickets are sold on a first-come, first-serve basis (with a $10 cash minimum as the suggested donation). Box office opens at 2 PM on the day of the performance. Bring a little bit of cash, and maybe a good ol’ pair of riot goggles… just in case.

John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World opens Saturday, April 10^th and runs until May 22^nd at A Noise Within, located at 234 South Brand Boulevard in Glendale. ‘Pay What You Can’ night starts at 7 PM on Sunday, April 11^th. For more information, please call (818) 240-0910, or visit www.anoisewithin.org.

“Waiting for Godot” was an instant success when it debuted at the Théatre de Babylone in Paris in January 1953. It ran for 400 performances and received critical praise from such writers as Tennessee Williams, Jean Anouilh, Thornton Wilder and William Saroyan. Greeted with jeers and boo’s from some audience members at its London and American premieres – and many times since – it has, nevertheless, enjoyed countless productions and rabid fans around the world for nearly 60 years. Arguably the most famous example of Theatre of the Absurd, a form of drama in which traditional plot, characters and action are discarded, “Godot” creates a surreal theatrical experience.

As Didi and Gogo remain stuck in a devastated landscape awaiting the arrival of a mysterious man who – spoiler alert – never arrives, “Waiting for Godot’’ takes on unexpected immediacy and poignancy in the wake of the earthquake that devastated Haiti last week. As we watch two men waiting interminably for either rescue or death, who can escape the mental overlay of tragic live-feed videos from Port-au-Prince, seared permanently on our collective visual cortex?

A Noise Within reprises for the third consecutive year its critically applauded production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting For Godot.” Running now through Sunday, January 24, the play features a uniformly excellent ensemble cast including Mark Bramhall (Lucky), Robertson Dean (Vladimir), Mitch Edmonds (Pozzo), Owen Sholar (Boy) and Joel Swetow (Estragon).

Director Andrew Traister describes his production as “a straightforward reading of the play. It is simply about two men waiting, but there was a definite desire to make these real men, with real problems, in a real relationship.” He also notes that the special challenge of directing an absurdist play is “understanding what the absurdity is and clearly defining it for the audience so they know what they are laughing at. There are no added extraneous bits that confuse the meaning of the play.”

This production contains no startling revelations, possibly because after decades of erudite debate, and thousands of directors fiddling with the “meaning’ of the text, there are no revelations to be had. ANW’s stark and unembellished telling allows the audience to respond authentically, unguided by the bludgeon of ‘inspiration.’ What it all may mean remains up to the viewer. Didi and Gogo cling to the flickering faith that Godot will come. Godot will bring answers. Godot will bring meaning. Godot will bring happiness. But help does not arrive. Not today. And, in the ruins of failed Socialism, robbed of will and volition, “there is nothing to be done.” So that is what they do: nothing.

“Waiting for Godot” may well be the ultimate 20th century statement on existential futility, penned as it was in the wake of the atom bomb. But it’s also a superbly well-crafted piece, which precisely matches form to content to historic period, while holding the mirror to its audience. As Kenneth Tynan wrote of Beckett’s doomed misfortunates after the infamous London premiere in 1955: “Were we not in the theater, we should, like them, be clowning and quarreling, aimlessly bickering and aimlessly making up — all, as one of them says, ‘to give the impression that we exist.’ ”

- By Penny Orloff

Angelenos have through January 24 to experience this theatrical event.  To purchase tickets or for a full season brochure, call 818-240-0910 x1 or visit their website.

I admit to more than a little skepticism over the idea that three actors could pull off anything resembling a credible reading of Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.” The press release swore they could do it all in 80 minutes. Yeah, right.

Still, it was offered by A Noise Within – one of the nation’s leading repertory companies and the only classical repertory company in Southern California.  How bad could it be? My fascination with the audacity of the concept lured me to Glendale.

Because of the theatre’s thrust stage configuration, the audience enters the realm of the play when they step into the house. From the first scene onward, characters magically emerge from and disappear into the mist of dreams, imagination and non-linear time, under director Craig Belknap’s admirable realization of this adaptation by Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus.

Among the three actors executing this monumental assignment is Michael A. Newcomer as the tormented Raskolnikov. Making his ANW debut, Newcomer moves subtly from the cerebral to the visceral over the course of the play. A great admirer of Napoleon, Raskolnikov aspires to the perpetration of world-changing mayhem, theorizing that men of great intelligence and vision are not bound by the laws which bind the masses. One surmises he would have idolized Hitler. But great sociopaths are born, not made. On his quest for greatness, Raskolnikov’s fatal flaw is conscience.

Also new to ANW, Holly Hawkins does quadruple duty as the self-sacrificing young prostitute, Sonia, as Raskolnikov’s mother, the abusive old pawnbroker, and the pawnbroker’s passive sister. Hawkins is an actress of considerable skills and fleshes out the characters with an admirable economy of gesture and expression. Here, however, is where the addition of one more actor – in the role of the young prostitute Sonia, through whose love Raskolnikov is redeemed – would have improved the production.

ANW resident artist Robertson Dean plays the Inspector and various other characters.  He is mesmerizing in his cat-and-mouse scenes with Newcomer, and both touching and repellent as Sonia’s alcoholic father.

- By Penny Orloff

“Crime and Punishment” runs in repertory with Shakespeare’s “Richard III” at A Noise Within.  For more information, please visit their website or call 818-240-0910.

Summer isn’t generally a time to plan ahead.  The summer forces us at least to try to forget what day of the week it is and we wouldn’t want to bring you crashing back into the reality of fall before needed; although fall in LA isn’t really like crashing into reality considering we won’t see rainfall until January.  In any case, we just got really excited about the upcoming 2009/2010 seasons at various arts establishments we had to share them! So get your Blackberrys out and start filling up your fall calendar, but don’t take any blazers or scarves out just yet.

In the theatre department, A Noise Within has got a fall and spring lineup that will literally make you cry and laugh.  Their fall shows include the dramatic Richard III by William Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Noises Off by British import Michael Ryan.  With the spring comes more laughs starting with Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing followed by Irish playwright John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World.  If we could only choose two, we’d likely head to Noises Off and Much Ado About Nothing, but we’re suckers for chaotic comedy, comic romance, and imports from the UK. 

On track with theatre, we find that Center Theatre Group has three lineups we ought to share.  Featured at the Kirk Douglas Theatre are works by Danai Gurira, Obie Award-winning Lisa Kron, and Malcolm McDowell in Tynan.  Over at the Mark Taper Forum, you’ve got Oleanna on view now and in the fall comes Tony Award-winning Parade.  Then once Spamalot closes at the Ahmanson, August Osage County takes its place, followed by Mary Poppins and Dreamgirls. 

The LA Philharmonic has quite a season coming up and it’s not just because I’m crazy for Verdi’s Requiem (being performed in November).  Gustavo Dudamel is coming! When his new job starts in October, he’ll be conducting the LA Phil through a season full of Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, and Ravel with guest performances throughout including the Berlin Philharmonic and Anjelique Kidjo. 

Over in Westwood at UCLA Live, the 2009/2010 season has a taste for everyone.  Kicking off the season, Annette Benning will star in Medea followed by Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s Purgatorio, inspired by the Divine Comedy.  Other performances include Culture Clash, Carlos Fuentes, and the Monterey Jazz Festival on Tour. 

So now you’ll know where to find us in the coming months.  We’ll let you know if we end up changing our plans, but it will take a really good season to change our plans – the summer’s for being spontaneous, but for the fall we’re all booked up! 

The play-within-a-play is a common theatrical device, maybe most memorable in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but just as evident in a show like Tina Fey’s 30 Rock.  Authors, screenwriters, and playwrights alike all seem to enjoy the interplay of an artificial reality within a larger artificial reality—and for good reasons too.  It allows the creator to explore the differences between the inner and outer selves, to illustrate the theatrics of everyday life, and of course, to comment on his/her own work (or creative masterpieces) as it plays out for the audience.

At a point during French playwright Jean Anouilh’s The Rehearsal—which runs until May 24 at A Noise Within in Glendale— we see this first hand as an actress…who plays an actress…who plays the Countess questions her husband, the Count (Robertson Dean), about whether or not his love interest in the play, Lucile, has become his love interest in real life. He responds with possibly the best line in the show: “Life is very nice, but it has no shape.  The object of art is actually to give it some and to do it by every artifice possible—truer than the truth.”  This one sentence summed up the entirety of the engaging two-and-a-half hour production; that oftentimes the ‘fake’ is more meaningful than the ‘real.’

The Rehearsal’s setting is a perfect example of this paradox; it takes place in 1950s France, but since the play-within-the-play is set closer to the 1750s, the characters seem much more themselves when disguised beneath the wigs and gowns of antiquated aristocracy.  In fact, the wigs only come off when we meet the impetus for the show’s conflict, Lucile, who never wears a wig herself.  She, unlike the rest of the Count’s hoity-toity social circle—his wife the stuffy Countess, the airhead Mistress, the Footman buffoon, or the drunken, manipulative Hero —is soft, naïve, and caring.  And it is due to these exact qualities that the Count falls deeply and openly in love with Lucile—much to the chagrin of the others.  The remaining scenes of The Rehearsal are not so much concerned with rehearsing as they are about winning over the romantic sentiments of the newly transformed Count—and by any means possible.

For the most part, A Noise Within’s recent rendition of this tragic farce, smoothly directed by Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, is right on the mark of what one wishes to see out of good, classical theatre—tight and assured performances, witty dialogue, transformative costumes and set-dressing, and maybe the most heart-warming in these times: a packed house on the second weekend.  If artifice does indeed give way to truth, then Rodriguez-Elliott succeeded in bringing true theatre to Los Angeles–even if it was just a rehearsal.  

- By Josh Morrison

Jean Anouilh’s The Rehearsal runs until May 24 at A Noise Within, located at South Brand Boulevard in Glendale.  For more information, please visit www.anoisewithin.org, or call (818) 240-0910.