PLAY: Ivo Van Hove's "The Misanthrope"

[N.B. There's a valid point to be made that you shouldn't read this review, or look at the picture below. You should just buy a ticket. Jaime says so. Matt says so. David says so. But I'm a critic, so below you'll find the reasons why you must see this production.]

Early on in The Misanthrope, our titular (anti)hero Alceste (a phenomenally dour, Rickman-like Bill Camp) proclaims: "We ought to punish pitilessly that shameful pretense of friendly intercourse. I like a man to be a man, and to show on all occasions the bottom of his heart in his discourse. Let that be the thing to speak, and never let our feelings be hidden beneath vain compliments."* If ever a director has agreed with this virtuous rant, it is Ivo Van Hove, who punishes his actors, using animalistic direction to drag out the savage bottom of their hearts, confrontational camera work to keep feelings from being hidden (or from running of stage), and superficial props (like food and garbage) to, ironically, strip away the superficial.

The play opens with sped-up shots of the cast having their makeup applied, which serves both to be frank (Van Hove seems reluctant to partition actors from their roles), and to establish the vanity of these characters. Then the overhead lights flicker with their harsh glow, and we find Philinte (a straight-faced Thomas Jay Ryan) trying to convince Alceste to be a little less brutally honest. Poor Alceste tries, with the self-proclaimed poet Oronte (Alfredo Narciso), but the bile boils over. Only with his lover, Celimene (Jeanine Serralles) is he more docile: he has the blind faith that he can change her. Instead, he ought to fear her more: she flirts so shamelessly with her "friends" (Acaste and Clitandre, played by Joan Macintosh and Jason C. Brown) that even the hypocritical prude, Arsinoe (Amelia Campbell) chastises her, and her cousin, Eliante (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), refuses to take her side. The entire cast is outstanding, particularly Bill Camp, and Serralles stands out (as she did in The Black Eyed), with her easy transitions between moods, pivots which are essential for illustrating the double-talk of socialites.

For emphasis, Jan Versweyveld's set limns them with sleek black reflective walls, displays them on a giant screen that makes up most of the back wall, and frames them with a series of windowless fourth walls. No matter where they go, the cameras (hidden behind the walls) follow, especially when they run (as they frequently do) offstage. It's a powerful effect, heightened by the harsh modernization of Harrison's translation and by Van Hove's violent, surprising direction.

The most striking scene has Celimene and her high-powered friends gathered around a table filled with the most decadent and fatty treats, all simultaneously talking on their cell phones and gorgeously gorging. In walks a fed-up Alceste, who turns their dinner party into a grotesque as he anoints himself with hot fudge, douses himself in ketchup, pours spaghetti and whipped cream down his pants, and crowns himself with half a watermelon.

Photo/Joan Marcus

Inflammatory staging such as this amplifies Moliere's words: at last the physical is as scathing as the verbal, and still--because of the often metaphoric qualities--subtle to a degree. They also help to build the emotion: rather than rushed rhyming couplets, the text now has a jazzy quality to it, with seductive rolls on the floor between lovers or prolonged and ridiculous wrestling matches between rivals. Such direct actions give way to the language--now ragged and sometimes clipped--and juxtapose the clean structure with the dirty truth.

The choice for an overbearing soundtrack, added to an already cinematic production, does steal from the effect. The actors are so crisp (even if their mikes are not) that it is unfair to make them fight music as well as emotion to make their point. Also, there are some segments that Van Hove hasn't quite figured out: Alceste's metadramatic use of a cameraman to reveal Celimene's betrayal is funny, but nothing more, and a video conference call between two cell phones and a Blackberry is awkward. (To be fair, it's awkward in the script, too.) Every play, no matter how experimental, must have some rules, and at times, it feels like Van Hove is cheating for the sake of aestheticism, not the integrity of the script.

Let him cheat. Ivo Van Hove is a brilliant auteur, and his work here, while distinctive, doesn't hurt Moliere, it just makes the revival fresh and unique. Van Hove, who seems to agree with Alceste that there should be frankness in all things, has put his reputation out on the table, spattered and splayed it across the walls. In return, he has made an unforgettably graphic comedy out of The Misanthrope, and that's a beautiful thing.

------------
*N.B. I don't have the 1973 Harrison translation, so this quote is from Bibliomania. I'd have used Richard Wilbur's, but his is too playful and polite to match Van Hove's vision.

PLAY: "The Black Eyed"

Photo Credit/Joan Marcus

The Black Eyed may have just opened at New York Theatre Workshop, but don't think for a second that it is a work in progress. Playwright Betty Shamieh has been working on this powerful show for five years, and it is now (like last month's NYTW show, Horizon) a masterful combination of theatrical craft and intelligent writing, and a human and political exploration of our post-9/11 perceptions, suffused with a subtle staging by Sam Gold and the rich emotions of a talented quartet of women.

The Black Eyed is an important and harshly relevant new work: controversial, but not to the point of self-combustion. Shamieh's questions are chokingly precise--"Why is violence only wrong when we [Palestinians] use it?"--and her answers range from pretty to vague and pretty vague. This is a compliment: she doesn't try to answer questions, but rather questions the answers of complacent people. Rather than settling on the easily inflammable issue of suicide bombing, she widens the scope to all of history's martyrs, and to the women that are their consequence. The angry, disillusioned, young bomber Aiesha (Aysan Celik), is met in her pink-walled limbo by Delilah (Emily Swallow), Samson's famous seductress; Tamam (Lameece Issaq), one of the many callously killed victims of the Crusades; and a young, nameless woman known only by her job, The Architect (Jeanine Serralles), and the hard-to-articulate hopes and dreams of our generation.

The Black Eyed is a hip play, though it bows to classicism. The characters double as a Greek chorus, although their interjections and echoes are used more as punctuation for Shamieh's slam-poetry verse. Paul Steinberg's stage is the audience's section of an amphitheater, all steps and levels, but it's modernized by an ominous wooden ceiling that hangs low above the audience. As for Gabriel Berry's costumes, the different outfits look less like anachronisms than evolutions in design, with similar patterns and blending colors binding these Palestinians together, even as centuries threaten to tear them apart. Director Sam Gold does such an excellent job managing the production values that the tangential nature of the show ends up being cohesive, and the individual plaints of these women add up to building the central dramatic arc.

The greatest surprise of The Black Eyed is its wit. The humor is a skirt for the passive politicizing behind the satire (like a commercial for the United States of Israel and Palestine: "Palreal"), but that doesn't stop the skirt from being pleated with increasingly complex ideas. Nor does the beauty of the gossamer language hide the presence of vulgarity: Aiesha is a bilious character who goads the other women by saying "Crudeness is necessary for clarity." Aiesha never knew beauty in her short life, and it's telling that the few moments of revered speech are reserved for her weapons: "I built something more intricate than the human heart,/hugged it to my chest,/and walked into the biggest crowd I could find."

The script is genius ("Arrogance is confidence that is snuffed out,/resuscitated,/and is never quite the same again"), but simply quoting it separates text from emotion, the too-easy escape from resolution. It also takes away from the wonderful actresses of this show, who stab these words at us with effortless grace. Issaq drops Tamam's prideful carriage just enough to let us see her relish the castration that she will one day exact on her rapists, Celik transforms Aiesha's rage into a terrifying passion, Swallow hides Delilah's guilt and shame beneath layers of silken cloth and silken seduction, and Serralles steals the show with her mastery of The Architect's intense and desperate fantasies.

The Black Eyed envelopes us in the human stories and sufferings of these beautiful, tragic women, and through their eyes, dares to question our callous answers to thoughts like, "So what if terror helped bring down apartheid in South Africa?" "So what if the Black Panther Movement got civil rights workers moving just a little bit quicker?" By no means does Betty Shamieh condone terrorism, nor is her play even about terrorism, but The Black Eyed speaks to the need to be heard beneath it all, and uses what should be the universal language of theater to poke, prod, and plead for understanding.