Theatre // Current TV

Hearing Man in Deaf Role Stirs Protests in New York

Artistic license has always been a part of adaptations on screen, stage and in print.... more

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'Ten Years Later,' The Matthew Shepard Story Retold

"The Laramie Project — one of the most-performed plays of the last decade — is based on the true story of Matthew Shepard, the young man who, in October 1998, was savagely beaten and left to die in Laramie, Wyo. Almost instantly, Shepard's name became a kind of grim rallying cry for those drawing attention to hate crimes committed against gays.

Now there's an epilogue to The Laramie Project, and tonight more than a hundred theaters around the country will perform readings of the new play. Together with the first one, it constitutes a powerful version of Matthew Shepard's story.

But it's not the only version — and that's a big part of why the epilogue exists.

Matthew Shepard's savage killing was used to strengthen the argument for hate-crimes legislation. But meanwhile, another version of his story was gathering steam.

Six years after the crime, the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 set out to debunk the idea that Shepard was murdered because he was gay. Like The Laramie Project, the one-hour episode included interviews with Shepard's friends, as well as investigators assigned to the case. ABC's Elizabeth Vargas interviewed Shepard's killers, Aaron McKinney and Russ Henderson, both serving life sentences.

Shepard, 20/20 reported, may have used methamphetamine. The report said that McKinney had been a dealer. "Meth is what made the world go around in Laramie," a friend of McKinney's and a former dealer told Vargas.

20/20 also reported that McKinney and Henderson had been on a meth binge in the days before meeting Shepard. And prosecutor Cal Rerucha told 20/20 that "the methamphetamine just fueled this point where there was no control. So, it was a horrible, horrible, horrible murder. But it was a murder that was driven by drugs."

Playwright Moises Kaufman believes the 20/20 story was "terrible journalism" that "changed the nature of the dialogue." So one of his goals with the new Laramie Project epilogue was to debunk the 20/20 story.

Kaufman and his Tectonic colleagues went back to Laramie last year, re-interviewing many of the people they'd met a decade ago — as well as talking to some new sources.

"One of the things we do in the play," says Kaufman, "is we go back and ask investigators ... and we go back over trial transcripts, and we prove that it was a hate crime."

The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later includes the comments of Rob Debree from the Albany County Sheriff's Office in Laramie.

"We've proven that there were no drugs on board with McKinney and Henderson — just none," Debree declares. And what about the claim that Shepard's murder was a robbery and drug deal gone bad? "That's some kind of massive denial," one openly gay Laramie resident tells Tectonic Theater.

Laramie police commander Dave O'Malley, who also appears in the 20/20 episode, says: "It angered me more than anything the things [ABC] didn't say — the things they left out."""The Laramie Project — one of the most-performed plays of the last decade... more

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Computer program proves Shakespeare didn't work alone, researchers claim

"The 400-year-old mystery of whether William Shakespeare was the author of an unattributed play about Edward III may have been solved by a computer program designed to detect plagiarism.

Sir Brian Vickers, an authority on Shakespeare at the Institute of English Studies at the University of London, believes that a comparison of phrases used in The Reign of King Edward III with Shakespeare’s early works proves conclusively that the Bard wrote the play in collaboration with Thomas Kyd, one of the most popular playwrights of his day.

The professor used software called Pl@giarism, developed by the University of Maastricht to detect cheating students, to compare language used in Edward III — published anonymously in 1596, when Shakespeare was 32 — with other plays of the period.

He discovered that playwrights often use the same patterns of speech, meaning that they have a linguistic fingerprint. The program identifies phrases of three words or more in an author’s known work and searches for them in unattributed plays. In tests where authors are known to be different, there are up to 20 matches because some phrases are in common usage. When Edward III was tested against Shakespeare’s works published before 1596 there were 200 matches.

Sir Brian said: “There might be ten to 20 common phrases between two plays by different authors. The computer is picking out three-word sequences that could just be chunks of grammar. But when you get metaphors or unusual parts of speech, it is different.”

The Shakespeare matches came from four scenes, about 40 per cent of the play. The remaining scenes had about 200 matches with works by Kyd, best known for The Spanish Tragedy, a play known to have influenced Shakespeare, indicating that he wrote the other 60 per cent of the play.

The suggestion that Shakespeare had a hand in Edward III has been debated for about 150 years but has found favour only recently. It was ignored by mainstream publications until 1997, when it was included in The Riverside Shakespeare, and has subsequently been accepted by The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works.

Sir Brian said: “When you have 200 [matches] you can be pretty sure. Everyone can see that certain scenes are very Shakespearean, but no one could see why there were verses that are definitely not his. There is a real difference in quality between the two authors.”

The mystery has endured because some academics refuse to believe that Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights at that stage of his career, he said. “They think, Shakespeare has been elevated to the position of the Bard, so why would he have collaborated with anyone else?”""The 400-year-old mystery of whether William Shakespeare was the author of an... more

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2 years ago
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After six years, Baghdad's theatre opens its doors again

"The play, To enjoy the sweetness you must taste the bitterness, produced,... more

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2 years ago
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Rupert Goold is wrong: Judi Dench is not 'strangling theatre'

"To claim that Dame Judi Dench is “strangling theatre” by suggesting that younger actors ought to have a bit more respect for the traditions to which they belong, as Rupert Goold has done, is insulting, absurd and maybe even self-serving. The director is hugely gifted, but he’s surely guilty of Year Zero, clean-slate thinking.

For him, freshness is too often about imposing his own clever-clever ideas on plays, not in discerning and fulfilling an author’s aims and intentions. And that’s not a generational problem, as Goold must have discovered when members of his own cast rebelled against his reinterpretation of King Lear, with the result that it was a bit more Shakespearean when it moved from Liverpool to London.

On the other hand, he’s right to defend younger actors from any inference that they’re less able than their predecessors. He’s equally right to add that they’re more physically adroit than, say, many members of the Gielgud generation. One can only judge the quality of actors from their performances on stage and my own recent experiences tell me that the future of acting and therefore of the British theatre is very bright indeed. Just last month I went to the little Bush Theatre in West London to see a play called 2nd May 1997, was delighted by a mainly young cast, and thrilled by a total unknown, a recent RADA graduate called Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

She played the unlikely pick-up of an earnest Lib Dem on election night — and suggested vulnerability, need, damage, even desperation, behind a tipsy, flirtatious and immaculately observed exterior. Would her and others’ performances have been better if they’d immersed themselves in theatrical history or watched their seniors from the wings, as Dame Judi did? In this case, probably not. In the case of major classical actors performing major classical plays, well, maybe.

Vanessa Redgrave is said to be able to walk on stage from the wings and, without obvious preparation or missing a beat, to transform herself into whatever character she is playing. American Method actors such as Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino will spend hours thinking, feeling, willing themselves into a role. Dame Judi herself tries to have a quiet, reflective time, girding herself for the fray in her dressing room and, when she’s not on stage, turning on the Tannoy and listening to the unfolding production.

To watch Sir Ian McKellen or Dame Judi herself evolve their characters in rehearsal and then present the result on stage is obviously an education.

But each performer must find his or her own way to excellence. It’s not as if the pressure is missing. In a profession where unemployment often exceeds 90 per cent, performers who fail to exploit every opportunity for self-improvement — well, they would have to be foolish, self-destructive, mad.""To claim that Dame Judi Dench is “strangling theatre” by suggesting... more

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Edgy Theatre Edged Out By Audiences

"Art for art's sake, goes the saying. But the UK's radical theatres are... more

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Tim Robbins, Actors' Gang stand up to tough times

"Tim Robbins jokes that he could've given the title "While Rome... more

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Lloyd Webber launches Phantom 2

"World-famous composer Lord Lloyd-Webber has launched his latest musical, Love... more

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Youth Theatre Project

The YTP (Youth Theater Project) is an innovative new arts program for youth in Braxton... more

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Anna Deavere Smith at Work

"In a bare, fluorescent-lit dressing room at the Second Stage Theater in Manhattan one afternoon in August, the actress Anna Deavere Smith was running lines. For any actor, learning lines requires considerable focus, but for Smith, who delivers every word of “Let Me Down Easy,” her one-woman show about health care and the body, it’s like a mental martial art.

Outside the worlds of theater and academia, Smith, a professor of performance studies at New York University, is perhaps best known for her role as an overbearing hospital administrator on the Showtime drama “Nurse Jackie” and for her performance as the hard-charging national-security adviser Nancy McNally on “The West Wing.” On “The West Wing,” too, she was required to learn complicated dialogue quickly and accurately — so accurately, says Smith, that someone was employed to remind actors to use, for example, “it is” rather than “it’s.”

But it’s in her hybrid capacity as playwright-documentarian-actress that Smith puts the greatest demands on her powers of recollection and re-creation, and it’s in this role that she has had the biggest impact. In 1992, a year after race riots tore through Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Smith, then 41, starred in “Fires in the Mirror,” a one-woman show in which she embodied the personas of 26 people she interviewed about the riots, some of them black, some of them Jewish, most of them in the Crown Heights community. She followed that play, which was an enormous critical success, with “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” an equally acclaimed one-woman show, this time about the riots that followed the acquittal of police officers involved in the beating of Rodney King.

With “Let Me Down Easy,” which opens on Wednesday, Smith has created a play that is more contemplative than her past works, albeit contemplative of fairly pressing subject matter: the limits of the body and the struggle to cope with those limits via the health care system. (Smith performed a very different version of the play at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn., in January 2008.)

Attention to thwarted justice runs through the play, as in so many of her others. A former medical-school associate dean describes how her position once unfairly helped expedite her care. An evangelical Christian woman relates the dehumanizing treatment her daughter received when a medical procedure went awry. Smith may be representing her traditional range of perspectives, but this time it’s the subject matter, rather than the treatment of it, that’s most novel. For about an hour and a half, the audience listens to people — some of them famous, some of them not — talk with wit or candor or resignation about death and illness. When a monologue by Gov. Ann Richards begins, “Well, let's talk about something else, Anna,” the audience laughs in knowing relief.

Several of Smith’s interviews with players on both sides of the debate about health care policy were discarded before and during previews, but they clearly helped shape the direction of the play. If Smith leaves one impression about the health care controversy, it is that no real progress on that front will occur until the public grows comfortable with having a different, fraught conversation — one about mortality, one that she is eager to help begin.""In a bare, fluorescent-lit dressing room at the Second Stage Theater in... more

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Why British Black Producers are Heading for Broadway

"Broadway is more than just the theatre. It is one of the major elements in New York’s economy. When Broadway is down, New York is in trouble. Broadway is always all-hands-on-deck.

This has helped to create in the under-subsidised American theatre a long and distinguished history of black practitioners who have worked in the cauldron of the commercial sector, who, in fact, would not dream of working anywhere else.

Through a network of theatres, critics who write about black theatre, and showcases such as Black2Broadway, ideas are forged, relationships made, money is raised, all aimed at the Great White Way.

This vigour and “Yes we can” spirit creates the inevitable hits and misses, but, above all, everyone steps up to the plate. Thus Broadway has been re-invigorated, even re-invented by productions like Allen’s, born in an open environment of the possible.

Here in Britain, we, too, have a smaller but just as determined and talented cadre of producers and would-be producers full of zeal who work in the commercial realm or in a mixture of the commercial and subsidised.

Unfortunately, we have a problem that America does not: British theatre along with many theatre critics too often only recognise the subsidised theatre as the place and indeed home of “proper” black theatre practitioners.

Of course, this is never said aloud and would be vigorously denied, but the fact is evident. Like an exclusive club, the subsidised theatre “chooses”, and its choices, while largely artistic, can also have other criteria. These other criteria can often determine the content of a play or production, that content playing a large part in whether the production happens at all.

This approach can sometimes limit the scope of the work, causing the young in particular to self-select before approaching a subsidised theatre. The mature and the mid-career who might have other things to say that might be off the grid are not encouraged. This creates an environment of “the Chosen”, as well as a serious talent drain...""Broadway is more than just the theatre. It is one of the major elements in New... more

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The best flag in the world

That's the flag of the Benin Empire, a pre-colonial African state situated in... more

remanns
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2 years ago
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Jude Law Opens in "Hamlet" on Broadway

Photographs from opening night for William Shakespear's "Hamlet" on... more

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Who/What are the "Wet Elephants"?

Shooting Johnson Roebling - Chapter 5

ManicAttack
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Does David Mamet still matter?

No. Er, sorry, here's the essay...

"A decade ago, the critic John Heilpern, who recently left his post at the New York Observer, published a collection of theatrical reviews and musings entitled "How Good Is David Mamet Anyway?" In the titular essay, Heilpern concluded: "The dramatist of early superior plays such as American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross has long since settled for dramatically less. Mr Mamet now merely prefers to provoke." A new play, Race, will make its Broadway debut in November. Mamet has remained typically tight-lipped about its plot, but theatre gossip doyen Michael Riedel has ferreted out a script and called it "Speed-the-Plow in blackface". It apparently concerns two male lawyers – one black, one white – and their female legal assistant, who take on a racially charged rape case.

It would be foolish to argue against Mamet's genius. I first read him at university and I remember feeling amazed and even a little appalled at his dialogue: funny, fast, pitiless, often profane. (I also recall feeling upset that he penned so few roles for women.) Watching my classmates perform scenes from his work proved equally surprising. Mamet's writing was lively on the page, but it was revelatory when spoken aloud – even by student actors. In performance, those rapid, rancid exchanges somehow uncovered a remarkable and unsettling depth of character. Those depths weren't pretty – they were grasping and craven and cruel – but, to my cynical 17-year-old soul, they seemed very true.

Last year, the Village Voice published an essay by Mamet entitled "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'," in which he claimed that he now repudiated his former beliefs that "the government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart". I won't deny Mamet's conversion experience, but if he has ever believed that "people are generally good at heart," it has gone unremarked in his plays. His distrust of human decency remains one of his most distinctive writerly characteristics.

So, people are not good. Here's the question: are Mamet's recent plays? The ones written since Heilpern published his essay do seem dramatically less significant and not even particularly provocative. I will admit to having enjoyed Mamet's adaptation of Harley Granville-Barker's The Voysey Inheritance, but feeling unsatisfied with Boston Marriage, a trifle about gilded-age lesbians.

As for his most recent plays, November and Romance, I read the scripts and elected not to attend. The political satire November is amusing, but shallow and innocuous. Much less funny was the courtroom-set Romance – a melee of gay jokes, Jew jokes, and an elderly ecdysiast. In a damning review, the New York Times depicted the frantic farce as positively soporific.

Perhaps Heilpern and the New York Times will hail Race as a return to form. We shall see. Only one thing's for certain – Mamet himself is unlikely to care (at least publicly). Near the close of Keep Your Pantheon, the troupe's leading actor contemplates his own mortality. Death can't be all bad, he reasons, if it involves a voyage to "that happy land … where there are no more critics".No. Er, sorry, here's the essay... "A decade ago, the critic John... more

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Good Theater Business News?!

"Folding theaters, plunging box office numbers and mass layoffs have dominated... more

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How L.A.'s 'WTF?! Festival' Got Its Name

"Last June, Actors' Gang artistic director Tim Robbins, above, and his... more

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It's a Theatre Set...AND a Tag Sale!

"You're at a play when suddenly your eye is drawn to an object on the set... more

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Filmed Theatre, Dead in the Can?

"From the Royal Opera House to Glyndebourne and the National Theatre, putting out... more

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