Word: breuer
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...BREUER'S THEATER is undoubtedly "experimental"-it calls itself that, and unsympathetic audiences will probably label it "offbeat" at best, "crazy" at worst. Purists will argue that in manipulating an actor's voice electronically Breuer is betraying the idea of live performance. They should consider that lighting has been an acceptable directorial tool since the turn of the century; yet when a director shines different colored or powered lights on a performer from different directions, he is doing with vision essentially the same as Breuer is with hearing: manipulating the path a performance travels on its way from the actor...
...BREUER, prominent in New York as a founder of the experimental Mabou Mines company that works out of Joseph Papp's Public Theater, has a simple answer for why he's directing Lulu, which opens this week: "It's my favorite play." Wedekind's Lulu plays, Earth Spirit and Pandors's Box-a single epic of the rise and fall of a creature of sex-present directors with a simple problem of logistics: in Breuer's words, "how to put the two plays together without making it a six-hour evening and without losing the extravagance...
...could suggest that Breuer's A.R.T. production risks that. With a live rock band, liberal use of the Loeb's well-endowed lighting system, and microphones everywhere, it promises to be arresting in its complexity. But behind the stage technology there lies a coherent vision of theater that Breuer is willing to define precisely...
...microphone is a constant companion to Breuer's stage work, and amplification figures centrally in much of the experimental work at Mabou Mines. Prelude to Death in Venice, a one-man show the company presented earlier this fall, used electronics to modify actor Bill Raymond's voice, metamorphosing its characteristics and its position. Far from undermining the effectiveness of dramatic performance, Breuer maintains that, properly directed, the amplifier can restore the theater: "The Loeb seats 550-plus. It's not that good acoustically, and the actors have to project like crazy. Do you know what happens to acting when...
...idea is not simply to mike the actors and jack up their volume; Breuer says that in wedding the aural techniques of radio and film to the visual images of a stage, he is using conventions the audience already understands but has never seen yoked together. The ancestor of this idea is the film director's voice-over: "It's theater about the way you think. When you think, there's about the way you think. When you think, there's a voice in your head, like someone speaking in your ear, and then there are abstract images...