Word: brechtian
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...middling traditional production. In 1969 came a sardonic Brechtian version placed in our own time--a fascinating show, but a failure. Now Coe has avowedly set out to rely almost wholly on the words and the audience's imagination (as the text itself repeatedly states), and to avail himself of a physical stage and props approaching Elizabethan simplicity. Coe has thus echoed the assertion of Schoenberg, high priest of atonal composition, that 'there is still much good music to be written in C major,' and of Mies van der Rohe, the renowned architect, that 'less is more...
Kate Edmund's set is the other unalloyed success of the evening. A.R.T. subscribers horrified at the high-tech circus of Lulu or put off by the gloomy Brechtian neon of Seven Deadly Sins earlier this year will be happy to hear that Figaro is staged straight, with period costumes by Rita Ryack. But the traditional mise-en-scene does not petrify the show. Edmunds has placed the Countess's bedroom, the courtroom, and the other havens of aristocracy underneath a patently fake proscenium, upstage; in the wings, stretching around the audience are the kitchens, dressing rooms and lofts...
...song for your daddy with a tune too feeble to accommodate the tragic sourfulness Elvis pours into it. "Clubland" is diverting but stupid, with a deadly, unexpansive chorus that endlessly rehashes a bottom-of-the-barrel pattern of notes. Which leaves, among other things, a nice, tinny, almost Brechtian exhortation to immorality in "Fish 'n' Chips Paper" (ironic, of course, but, unlike Brecht, pessimistic), and a delicate number called "Big Sister's Clothes" that exemplifies the change in Elvis's thinking...
...what happens to acting when it's projected?" It Loses truth. It hurts when you start to project Chekhov to a thousand-seat theater. I wanted something even more intimate than Chekhov, yet I wanted something gigantic too...I try to combine the radio-film soundtrack technique with realistic Brechtian staging, bridged by an element of cinematic imagery...
THANKS TO Michael Feingold's new translation and Epstein's careful attention to keeping the stage action intelligible, the upside-down Brechtian morality comes through without ever having to be explicitly stated. Given that most of the action is mimed or danced, and that the running commentary emerging from Anna 1 and the sisters' family chorus often states only obliquely just what the sisters are doing, that is a major accomplishment in the revival of this work...