Word: sellarsization
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The Bedbug, a satire of Party bureaycracy, describes the ordeal of a petty official who is frozen in an accident on his wedding day in 1929 and is defrosted in the Socialist world-state in 1979. This plot is barely intelligible in Peter Sellar's frenzied production, however. Mayakovsky's...
Sellars chose a thrust, semi-arena stage for this production, bare except for white gauze strips concealing the huge number of props trotted out for each scene. While this staging does evoke the circus-like atmosphere Mayakovsky wrote into the play, Sellars does not overcome the audibility problems inherent in...
Sellars comes into his own in the second act. Futuristic fantasy is more suited to his playland theatrical style. His actors, done up in round bug suits with mops on their heads, race around the stage with shopping carts. The supermarket motif is reinforced in an incessant procession of slides...
The only character not affected by Sellars' mania is Skripkin, the defrosted man. Alone in his cell, an object of curiosity and disgust to the neo-socialist zombies, Skripkin is a solitary figure of humanity in a commercialized, sanitized, and bureaucratized world. Chris Clemenson as Skripkin has the only real...
Perhaps we are so taken with Skripkin's speech because we are in a similar position. Assaulted by Sellars' sound and fury, we feel as confused, trapped and embarrassed as Skripkin in his cage. Why does Peter Sellars have so much contempt for his audience that he goes so far...