Stageview March - May 2014 by Syracuse Stage

MARCH - MAY 2014

SYRACUSE STAGE: |1| CHINGLISH |5| THE GLASS MENAGERIE SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY DRAMA: |7| THE GOOD WOMAN OF SETZUAN |10| SPRING AWAKENING

Across the Comic Prior to writing his riotously funny play Chinglish, David Henry Hwang had been spending a fair amount of time in China. Interest by the Chinese in Broadway-style shows prompted interest in Hwang, who, in his own words, is “the only even nominally-Chinese person who’s ever written a Broadway show.” So for five or six years, Hwang periodically traveled to China to discuss the possibilities of mounting such shows in the new cultural centers that were being constructed throughout the country at the time. On one visit in 2005, Hwang had an experience that became the inspiration for his comedy. “We went to one brand-new cultural center that had gorgeous Italian marble, fine Brazilian wood, smart German design and these horribly translated signs for handicapped restrooms that read, ‘Deformed Man’s Toilet,’” Hwang told the New

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York Times. “You saw this over and over—an eagerness among Chinese and Americans to impress one another, yet wildly basic misunderstandings because of language and cultural differences. I realized I’d never seen a play deal with this, where characters are groping to relate to each other while keeping the dignity of their own language.” Groping is an appropriate way to describe the comic interactions of Hwang’s characters in Chinglish. No matter how hard they try to understand each other— in contexts of business and pleasure—their attempts are clumsy and misunderstood. Language is not the only divide; cultural differences and perceptions also keep them apart. Daniel Cavanaugh (Peter O’Connor) heads a familyrun, Cleveland-based, sign-making company that has fallen on hard times. In an attempt to salvage COVER: Tina Chilip and Peter O'Connor in Chinglish PHOTO: Patrick Weishampel BELOW: Peter O'Connor and Tina Chilip in Chinglish PHOTO: Patrick Weishampel

the business, Cavanaugh travels to the provincial Chinese city of Guiyang with the hope of obtaining a lucrative contract to provide signs for a new cultural complex. Approval for the deal rests with the local cultural minister, but it is the vice minister of culture, an attractive woman named Xi Yan (Tina Chilip), with whom Cavanaugh mostly negotiates. As often happens in comedy, business leads to romance and working dinners to bedroom play. Yet for all the time spent over drinks and under sheets, understanding remains elusive. “It’s a comedy, but so much more,” director May Adrales explained in a recent interview. “A business guy wants to corner a new market in China, but he’s trapped in a world he can’t understand. It goes deeper than language. We all know what it’s like to be misunderstood.” For the audience, a good portion of that misunderstanding is spelled out literally in surtitles that are projected onto the stage and provide English translation of the Mandarin dialogue. At least one quarter of the play’s dialogue is in Mandarin that requires some seven hundred individual projections to translate. In addition to serving the practical function of interpretation, Hwang believes the surtitles support the comedic situations in the play.

Whatever resistance Hwang anticipated has been more than dispelled by the play’s success. It premiered at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre where it enjoyed a sold-out run before moving to Broadway where it was deemed one of the best plays of 2011 by Time Magazine. “One of the most gratifying experiences of my career has been sitting in [Broadway’s] Longacre Theatre, watching and listening to Western, Asian American and Chinese nationals laughing together,“ Hwang noted. “This leads me to believe that the show is at least an equal opportunity offender— poking fun at the West as much as the East.” - Joseph Whelan

CHINGLISH

By David Henry Hwang Directed by May Adrales

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“If you look at traditional comedy, particularly out of the farce tradition, it comes from the idea that the audience knows more than the characters do,” Hwang noted in an interview. “So we know that the mistress is hiding in the closet, but the characters don’t all know that. Then our pleasure derives from the fact that we’re in on something the characters aren’t. In some sense, the surtitles serve the same function in this play, for the audience to be more omniscient than the characters."

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Hwang is the most prominent Asian American playwright working today, and although he studied Mandarin in college, he does not speak the language. Initially, he thought he would be taking a risk trying to get a bi-lingual play produced. Nonetheless, Hwang felt that in a time of globalization it was important to write about the intersection of U.S. and Chinese business and culture. “I feel the gulf between China and the U.S. is pretty wide right now,” he explained. “The Chinese are working harder to learn about the West than vice versa. I certainly believe true understanding is possible, but it will require real effort, openness, and a willingness to accept that certain mindsets each side considers innate, are actually much more culturally determined. In other words, different people see the world differently.”

sat. MAR 15 3 pm ad, 8 pm

wed. MAR 5 2 pm oc, 7:30 pm thur. MAR 6 7:30 pm h fri. MAR 7 8 pm sat. MAR 8 3 pm s,pl, 8 pm sun. MAR 9 2 pm, 7 pm d tues. MAR 11 7:30 pm wed. MAR 12 7:30 pm thur. MAR 13 7:30 pm pl fri. MAR 14 8 pm sun. MAR 16 2 pm oc p = preview o = opening d = discussion s = ASL interpreted oc = open captioning ad = audio described pl = prologue h = happy hour

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SYRACUSE STAGE |

n his production notes to one of the published versions of The Glass Menagerie (there are three) Tennessee Williams included a section he titled “The Screen Device.” In this he explains the following: There is only one important difference between the original and the acting version of the play and that is the omission in the latter of the device that I tentatively included in my original script. This device was the use of a screen on which were projected magic-lantern slides bearing images or titles . . . These images and legends, projected from behind, were cast on a section of the wall between the front-room and dining room areas, which should be indistinguishable from the rest when not in use . . . The purpose of this will probably be apparent. It is to give accent to certain values in each scene. Each scene contains a particular point (or several) which is structurally the most important.

xamples of legends Williams includes in the script are “The Crust of Humility” during an early scene between Amanda and Laura, and “I don’t suppose you remember me at all!” just prior to the meeting between Laura and the Gentleman Caller, Jim. Some of the images Williams suggests are A swarm of typewriters, A sailing vessel with Jolly Roger and Blue Roses.

he connections between the legends and images and the text are, as Williams notes, “apparent” even to those just casually familiar with the play: Laura has dropped out of the typing class in business school, Tom dreams of escape in the merchant marines, and Blue Roses is the nickname Jim gave Laura in their high school days. Still, even as a young playwright, Williams was capable of great subtlety; therefore, it is always worth asking, and re-asking, what might he have been thinking when he envisioned using projections in the play, and what might any specific image or legend connote? Williams seems to invite such investigation in his production note on the screen device: The legend or image upon the screen will strengthen the effect of what is merely allusion in the writing and allow the primary point to be made more simply and lightly than if the entire responsibility were on the spoken lines. Aside from this structural value, I think the screen will have a definite emotional appeal, less definable but just as important. An imaginative producer or director may invent other uses for this device than those indicated in the present script. In fact the possibilities of the device seem much larger to me than the instance of this play can possibly utilize.

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n preparing to direct The Glass Menagerie for Syracuse Stage, Tim Bond decided to “accept” Williams’ “invitation” and explore the possibilities of mounting a production that restores the screen device, as the author originally intended, though it has rarely, if ever, been incorporated in performance, not even in the Chicago and Broadway premieres. The result for the audience will be to experience the play in an entirely new way. As Stage dramaturg Kyle Bass notes, “Even people who have seen The Glass Menagerie have not seen it like this.”

f course Bond and his team of designers, including scenic designer William Bloodgood and projection designer Kate Freer, can take advantage of technology that was not available in 1944. Whereas Williams was limited to one projection point, Bond can project onto multiple sites on the set, and that capacity is accommodated in the scenic design. Moreover, where Williams calls for static images and legends, Bond sees the potential for other media, specifically video, to underscore Williams’ concept of The Glass Menagerie as a “memory” play, and even distinguish between those characters seen in the past, Laura and Amanda, and Tom, who exists in the past and the present. Also, in this context, it is worth recalling that playwright Williams was a big fan of and influenced by the movies, and that character Tom uses the movies to escape the physical claustrophobia of the family apartment and the spiritual claustrophobia of the Continental Shoemakers warehouse, where he is unhappily employed.

nother aspect of the play, rooted in the text, also sparked Bond’s imagination. Williams includes a number of references to Hispanic culture. In his first monologue, Tom refers to events in Spain: “In Spain there was revolution . . . In Spain there was Guernica.” Some of the music the playwright calls for has a Latin flavor, and Tom mentions a Mr. Mendoza who works at the warehouse. (Coincidentally, or perhaps not, Williams favored vacations in Mexico.)

hese references, sprinkled throughout The Glass Menagerie, led Bond to consider if the play might support a shift in its cultural context, and if that context might inform and add layers to the characters. Suppose the father of Tom and Laura, the man who dissappeared one day 16 years before the events of the play, was Hispanic. That would make Tom and Laura children of mixed race in mid-1940s America. Might that in some way contribute to Laura’s shyness and Tom’s restlessness—her desire to hide from and his desire to escape from a world in which they don’t seem to belong? Moreover, a question left unasked in the text but that certainly merits investigation is what prevents Amanda from seeking help from her family? Surely, from what she says of her youth, hers was a family with some degree of affluence. Could the reason for her current estrangement be due to her family’s disapproval of the man she chose?

THE GLASS MENAGERIE

ncorporating this cultural context in the production is not to suggest a facile answer for the individual struggles each character faces. Rather, as Bass explains, it is a matter of complexity, a way to deepen and layer the characters’ circumstances. How does being a mixed race family heighten Amanda’s concern and worry for her children? How does it influence Tom’s sense of responsibility for his sister? What does it add to Laura’s already compromised sense of herself?

ince his arrival at Syracuse Stage, Bond has promised exciting and innovative interpretations of classic plays. By this he does not mean reinventing or revising the existing work, but investigating it in such a way as to reveal it in a new light. In The Glass Menagerie, he has found a way to not only see an American classic in a new light, but at the same time, by employing the original screen device, to see it as the playwright originally intended.

- Joseph Whelan

APRIL 2 - 27

By Tennessee Williams Directed by Timothy Bond wed. APR 2 7:30 pm p thur. APR 3 7:30 pm p fri. APR 4 8 pm o sat. APR 5 3 pm, 8 pm sun. APR 6 2 pm pl thur. APR 10

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Joseph Midyett who appeared as Picasso in Picasso at the Lapin Agile returns to Syracuse Stage to play Tom in The Glass Menagerie. PHOTO: T. Charles Erickson SYRACUSE STAGE

It's Not Easy Being Good. By Joseph Whelan “Who would not be a good and kindly person, but circumstances won’t have it so.” This glib observation belongs to Jonathon Jeremiah Peachum, the beggar boss of the Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht musical The Threepenny Opera. It is a dramatic concern that appears repeatedly in Brecht's plays and provides the central dilemma for Shen Tei, the lead character of The Good Woman of Setzuan. Brecht’s adult life was impacted by the major catastrophes of the 20th century. He was not yet twenty-years-old when he was conscripted into the German Army during World War I where he served as a medical orderly and witnessed the horrific suffering of the battlefield. Later, he would flee Germany during the Nazi’s rise to power and go into an exile that lasted fourteen years. Nonetheless, on a very fundamental level, Brecht remained an optimist. Unhappiness was not a result of individual failing so much as a consequence of the individual trying to negotiate a world in which bad behavior is rewarded. The critic Richard Gilman explains Brecht's position this way: “Human beings plan moral universes or systems of ideal behavior which are brought to

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ruin by the inimical structure of the actual world; we are not allowed to be what we might be.” In other words, the fault is neither in our stars nor ourselves, but in the social structures—chiefly economic—that determine how we live and are often in conflict with those values we associate with “goodness.” This is precisely the problem that confronts Shen Tei, a poor and kindhearted prostitute who, with the help of three traveling gods, comes into an economic windfall. The gods have been on a long search throughout the world to find one good person. They arrive in Setzuan tired and hungry and hoping to find a place to stay. No one will take them in except Shen Tei because she is good to everyone. The gods reward her with 1000 silver dollars, enough for her to buy a small tobacco shop. Soon Shen Tei’s neighbors and friends are taking advantage of her largesse to the point that she faces imminent ruin. Her solution is to assume an alter ego, a male cousin Shui Ta, who acts with a certain ruthlessness and eventually takes up full-time residence in the shop in order to stop the financial loss. What became of

the kindly Shen Tei is a question posed by the now disgruntled and soon to be suspicious neighbors and friends. What becomes of her is a question she—and by extension the playwright and audience— must ask. It will be up to the gods to decide. In addition to his many acclaimed plays—The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage and her Children, and Galileo, among others— Brecht was also well-known for his Marxist principles and dramaturgical theories. He sharply criticized much of the theatre of his day, labeling it “culinary theatre” that was designed to placate

and satiate the audience. Brecht wanted theatre to arouse the audience and instill “wakefulness.” Borrowing from Marx, he explained, “I wanted to apply to the theatre the saying that one should not only interpret the world but change it.” To that end he began to experiment with ways to retool the conventions of the stage chiefly to achieve a change in emphasis. Instead of having a theatre in which audience

members identify with characters and enjoy a vicarious experience, he wanted to distance the audience from the story and the characters through a process he eventually called the “alienation effect.” While Brecht articulated a number of distinctions between his type of theatre, which he called “epic theatre,” and conventional dramatic or Aristotelian theatre, the fundamental difference concerned how the audience experienced the play. Dramatic theatre, Brecht believed, invited the audience to become involved in something. Conversely, epic theatre should turn the audience into observers made to face something. If dramatic theatre begs the question “What is going to happen next,” epic theatre should provoke such queries as “how did this happen,” or “why did this happen the way it did?” As Gilman notes: “Governing everything was Brecht’s wish to move the theatrical spectator away from empathy or identification with the play’s characters, for this put him in the presence of what he already knew and left consciousness unchanged.”

them as rules or absolutes. He was far too practical a man of theatre to be dogmatic. He understood that if anything about theatre was unequivocal, it was that theatre should entertain. His best plays reflect this with their music hall inspired antics, sharp wit, and compelling characters. As Charles Isherwood of The New York Times noted in a review of a recent production of Good Woman, “If you associate Brecht with heavy-treading, messagemongering nights at the theatre, you may be taken aback to find how purely entertaining his work can be.”

While Brecht wrote essays about his dramaturgical ideas, and as a director, tried to realize them in production, he never viewed

By Bertolt Brecht Directed by Felix Ivanov Performed in the Loft Theatre

Or as Brecht himself put it in a 1952 journal entry, “Art ought to be a means of education, but its purpose is to give pleasure.”

March 28 - April 13, 2014

Presented by Syracuse University’s Department of Drama in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, The Good Woman of Setzuan by Bertolt Brecht. March 28 - April 13, 2014 in the Storch Theatre at 820 East Genesee Street. Tickets are $16-$18, available at 315-443-3275 or by visiting http://vpa.syr.edu/drama.

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SU DRAMA |

he source of Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik’s multiple Tony Award-winning musical Spring Awakening is Frank Wedekind’s controversial 1891 play of the same name. Wedekind subtitled his play A Children’s Tragedy and in it he unleashed a blistering attack on the repressiveness of German society in the late 19th century. Like the musical it inspired, Wedekind’s play focuses on a group of adolescent boys and girls who grapple with the emotional and physical changes of puberty without any guidance or understanding from the adults in their lives, principally parents and teachers. The children have been denied any information about human sexuality, which leaves them lost at best and agonized in the extreme. As the play’s subtitle spells out, the result is tragedy. A terror of the German bourgeoisie, as he has been called, Wedekind approached his subject with an openness and candor that shocked audiences. Suicide, rape, abortion, child abuse, homosexuality, and masturbation are frankly depicted in the play. Wedekind was labeled immoral and his work degenerate and pornographic. Censors were aroused, if not inflamed. Wedekind could not find a publisher in Germany and eventually published Spring Awakening himself in Switzerland. The first German production wasn’t until 1906 when Max Reinhardt

Composer Duncan Sheik

presented it at the Deutches Theatre in Berlin—“it exploded in the theatre like a bombshell,” wrote one critic. In England, Spring Awakening was banned until 1963 and didn’t receive an uncensored production until the 1970s. In addition to its controversial subject matter, Spring Awakening also drew attention for its unconventional style. Today it is regarded as a seminal work of modern theatre and a pre-cursor to Expressionism and the work of Bertolt Brecht. Instead of conventional narration,

Wedekind favored loosely connected scenes that reveal character and situation, more theatrical mosaic than well-made play. For librettist and lyricist Sater,

adapting Wedekind’s play was initially a matter of instinct. “I knew and loved the play,” he wrote in American Theatre magazine. “I had long felt it was sort of an operain-waiting.” The operatic genre he had in mind was distinctly pop/ rock, and specifically the music of singer/songwriter and composer Duncan Sheik.

Presented by Syracuse University’s Department of Drama in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, Spring Awakening by Book and lyrics by Steven Sater I Music by Duncan Sheik. April 25 - May 10 in the Storch Theatre at 820 East Genesee Street. Tickets are $16-$18, available at 315-443-3275 or by visiting http://vpa.syr.edu/drama. 7

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“In Spring Awakening, when music happens, time suspends..." “Wedekind’s play is full of the unheard, anguished cries of young people,’ wrote Sater. “It struck me that pop music—rock music—is the exact place that adolescents for the last few generations have found release from, and expression of, that same mute pain.” Within that, he noted, he could already “hear” Sheik’s music. “There’s a melancholy these kids have that I think does relate to what I do musically,” explained Sheik in an interview. “With Spring Awakening, by and large these are songs that wouldn’t sound out of place on my own records, but when they’re sung by the kids in the context of the show they take on a different life.” Including the cast recording of Spring Awakening, Sheik has now released 11 albums, and has worked on other plays (American Psycho has just opened in London), but he had no theatrical experience when he and Sater started work on Spring Awakening. From the outset the duo knew they would be bending some rules. “Instinctively, I felt I did not want to write lyrics that would forward the plot,” wrote Sater. “I wanted a sharp and clear distinction between the world of the spoken and the world of the sung.” On stage, this becomes two distinct realities: the world of 19th century Germany and an almost concert-like forum where the young cast members step out of the scenes and sing into hand-held microphones. “In our show, the scenes set out the world of 19th century repression, while the songs afford our young characters a momentary release into a pop idiom,” Sater noted. “We are all still rock stars in the privacy of our own bedrooms.” As Sheik explained: “In Spring Awakening, when music happens, time suspends. I wanted the music to come from where I come from, stylistically. Eventually we settled on the fact that the play was still 19th century and the music was contemporary—or, let’s just say, out of time.”

“What’s so moving about both the original text and the musical re-imagining of it is seeing how young people deal with their sexual awakening in a world determined to continue infantilizing them,” Barakiva noted. “The idea of ‘teenager,’ a transition from child to adult, is a post-WWI concept, and this play, written in the late 19th century dramatizes the pain and acute erotic longing in a group of young students with adult desires who are treated like children.” Part of the way the play speaks to today’s world, Barakiva believes, is as a measure of how much has indeed changed, and not necessarily for better. “It is painfully contemporary in two ways - the first is that now, a little over a hundred years later, we’ve swung in the other direction. Instead of ignoring the erotic impulses of the young people in our world and society, we overly-eroticize them, as is seen in everything from teen beauty pageants to Miley Cyrus’ videos, which aim for the sexual shocking but land in the world of disappointing androgynous soft-core porn,” he said. “But ironically, while we continue exposing our youth to these incredibly graphic images, at the same time, we continue infantilizing them through the phenomenon of helicopter parenting and through obsessive social media.” The great success of the musical version of Spring Awakening (8 Tony Awards including Best Musical, 4 Drama Desk Awards, a Grammy for the cast recording, 4 Olivier Awards including Best Musical, plus multiple international productions) clearly indicates that through Sater and Sheik, Wedekind’s message has found widespread resonance in the contemporary world. Banned and reviled for much of the 20th century, it seems the world may have finally caught up with him. As one contemporary wrote of him: “Wedekind was a prophet in the darkness. He had come before his time.”

For Sater, the cross-cutting between then and now underscores “the sadly enduring relevance of our theme,” an opinion shared by director Michael Barakiva.