Word: breuer
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NOBODY COULD FAULT Breuer on his showman's instincts, except maybe the blockish Cambridge bourgeoisie who have made walking out of Lulu all the rage. But all of this only makes Lulu a sort of elevated circus; a lot of the good things you could say about Breuer could be said about P.T. Barnum, with little modification. There is an awful lot of camp, and because of Breuer's theatre sense it almost always works. But it's still camp. And there are shock effects--I am thinking particularly of the murder at the end--that work as well...
...this notion, the meat of Wedekind's sex tragedies, Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box, has been all but completely lost in Lee Breuer's production of Lulu at the Loeb. Lulu, the angelic witch who seduces men with her blend of whorishness and innocence in the Wedekind plays, has become the eponym for an adaptation by Michael Feingold. Feingold, and the company in rehearsal, have updated the play by translating it to a contemporary landscape. So we get references to the Dalai Lama, Lulu moves on roller skates, Schwartz the painter becomes Carbone the fashion photographer, Rodrigo the acrobat...
...What Breuer has constructed is a fantasia on Wedekind, less Wedekind than Breuer. Which is not necessarily to knock it, for when it is good, Lulu is as good as anything the Rep has yet put on. The staging is continuously engaging and visually interesting, the technical effects are never gratuitous, and always surprising; throughout, there's a contagious joy in theatre, a constant thread of spieltrieb, of play and wit and imagination. For example, there's the spontaneous appearance in the first half of a rock band, led by the preternaturally cool Steve Drury, on a podium that rises...
...experimental theater in America is, financially, a leaky ship on a long trip; Breuer points out that his Mabou Mines company, formed in 1970, is probably the longest-lasting venture of its kind, but adds, "We're living on borrowed time." The equipment Breuer's sonic directing requires isn't cheap, either. But in the long run his ideas are eminently practical: they accept the loss in intimacy that follows from the financial need for large theaters, and seek to deploy technology intelligently to restore some kind of dramatic truth...
...theater seating over 200 people, for my style of acting, I would want to amplify," Breuer says. And in accepting the reality of large theaters, Breuer also seems to realize that only by keeping halls from being too small and tickets from being too expensive can he and other directors get the kind of audiences they want-not the homogeneously affluent subscribers who keep theaters like A.R.T. afloat yet paradoxically turn ther noses up at the word "experimental," but a younger, more diverse group of people that would approach productions like Lulu with open eyes and ears, and no harumphs...