Word: lulu
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...pistol cracks-blanks, but as jolting as the real thing. It's the first murder scene, and Catherine Slade, the actress playing Lulu, calls out for champagne. Someone makes a popping noise with his index finger and mouth...
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...
...clip the scenes in Lulu down to make the thing manageable, you change the play from dramatic to narrative form-which, today, is film. The microphones let the actors be low-key. If you play the hysteria, you'll have one screaming, fucking mess for three hours...
...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...