Holland Festival June 2009

Amsterdam. A city full of dichotomies. Restrictive Dutch heritage and whores in glass boxes. Troupes of tripping backpackers and heart-heavy visitors in Anne Frank's attic. As such, the 62nd Annual Holland Festival captured its city perfectly by leveraging the theme "Serenity & Anxiety" to frame its 34 international productions from June 4-28, 2009.

Forced to Tour/tour de force?

The Dutch Theatre Critics Association (Kring van Nederlandse Theatercritici) and the Festival gathered members of the International Association of Theatre Critics from more than 20 nations to discuss the theatrical selections at this year's festival and to debate our theme of Forced to Tour/tour de force?. Through a series of formal presentations and informal chats, we explored the effects of globalization and immigration on the interpreters of self-expression--that is, how theater critics see "immigrant" or "migrant" theater at home and abroad.

One of the most compelling presentations was by the South African critic Brent Meersman ("From Ipi Tombi to iMumbo Jumbo: How to Act Black"). He touched upon early African "performance" with the example of Saartjie Baartman (aka Sarah Bartman), a Khoisan woman who was forced to entertain 19th century European audiences by gyrating her nude buttocks and showing what was, to them, her shocking human body.

America's Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks wrote the play "Venus" about Baartman in 1996. (Directed by Richard Foreman, it was presented by The Public Theater.) Meersman noted how since international tours of "The Lion King" have swept the globe, most plays from his home country are inevitably compared to that Disney production. Certainly a welcome shift from the early 19th century, but still demonstrating a marked lack of understanding African theater and performance beyond what Westerners interpret simply as spectacle.

Holland Festival: Theater & Music

The Antonioni Project


One of the most striking offerings at the festival was "The Antonioni Project" by Flemish director Ivo van Hove. Through live acting and live video, he imported the Italian films of Michelangelo Antonioni (“L’Avventura,” “La Notte” and “L’Eclisse”) to the Dutch stage at Stadsschouwburg. While Van Hove works primarily in Holland as the artistic director of Toneelgroep Amsterdam, he maintains a home here in New York where his works are frequently staged (usually at New York Theater Workshop). Last fall, his production of "Opening Night" as part of BAM's Next Wave Festival caught the attention of many Gotham critics.

In the beautiful Stadsschouwburg, Amsterdam's municipal theater, Van Hove's vision of love and compromise was refracted through Antonioni's twisted lens. A stellar cast of 17 strode across the massive stage, while camera crews followed their moves, which were projected above the stage. The juxtaposition between theater and film, built scenery and a green screen, underscored the performance's central theme of outer artifice and inner truth. The cast was strikingly talented, giving Hollywood's best a run for their money (Cate Blanchette, Sean Penn and their ilk). Karina Smulders was irresistibly adorable as the bouncy, blonde object of Sandro's (Fedja van Huet) affection, while Halina Reijn countered her as the shrewd brunette avoiding the advances of the bold stock broker Piero (Jacob Derwig).

The scope of the production and the level of acting was among the most staggering I've seen. Pity, the Dutch was not translated for this international festival, so I don't know whether the text added or detracted from the visual excellence of "The Antonioni Project".

[The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh 1928)
The Brooklyn-based company Elevator Repair Service brought their self-indulgent production to Holland. I reviewed the show at New York Theatre Workshop last May for Portugal's Revista Obscena. No need to put myself through that again on any continent.]


The indie folk-rock group Antony and The Johnsons was joined by Holland's Metropole Orchestra for a two-night engagement at the Koninklijk Theater Carré. His 2005 album I Am a Bird Now bewitched me, but I had never had the chance to see them perform live. Lead man Antony Hegarty is a British-born singer-songwriter who lives here in New York. (So I have to go to Amsterdam to see him. Go figure.)

When the thick, red curtain rose to expose the figure of Antony, I was taken aback. Sitting there in the fourth row, no more than 20 feet from him, I found a chubby, pained angel figure with a mop of tangled black hair. During his first two songs with the massive orchestra behind him ("Everything Is New" and "For Today I Am A Boy"), he writhed and twitched, looking up into nothingness. As the performance continued, his anxiety diminished and the vocalist opened a bit to the 2,000-person audience. Musing on the agreement between performer and audience, he offered, “It’s really magical, isn't it? It's so mysterious. It beats me sitting in my room.”

The group's new song "Everglade" was inspired by John Everett Millais' famous painting of Ophelia and Antony's observations of his own mother's aging. Another new song, "Salt, Silver and Oxygen" actually brought a contended smile to the singer's face, as he intoned about a boy “dancing with his casket” and urged the listener to “elect the salt mother" because "she’s a selective Christ”. (If it makes him happy...)

One of his most endearing and down-to-earth moves was Hegarty's version of “Crazy in Love”, the 2003 pop hit by Beyoncé. Sung with all sincerity, the song transformed in Antony's mouth, with the idea of "looking so crazy in love" taking on a darker implication than when sung by the twinkle-eyed mega-star. In that moment, the audience could sit back and know--or at least hope--that Antony had found some serenity, however fleeting.

And Also...

Simultaneous to the Holland Festival's offerings was the Grand Opening of the Hermitage Amsterdam, with the opening exhibition "At the Russian Court" with more than 1,800 treasures from the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg (and all the fuel needed to spark the Russian revolution). Meanwhile, a European White Night, an overnight festival timed with the summer solstice, provided 31 hours of activity in the Hermitage. With the Amsterdam sun setting around 10:30pm each night, there was plenty of light to continue the party late into the morning.

At 10:00 pm, the popular pair of Dutch dancers Peter Bosveld and Euvgenia Parakhina taught visitors a brief Russian waltz in the museum's kerkzaal, while a Dutch quartet, 4tuoze Matroze, played Russian tunes on their violins, accordion, and piano at midnight. At 1:00 am the silent disco began. A dance party without traditional speaker system, the silent disco relies on dancers jamming out with wireless headphones and a DJ with an FM transmitter. (Those without the headphones hear no music.) We got some Gogol Bordello, Franz Ferdinand and a slew of Euro dance hits that I didn't know, but that made the room shake. The disco went until 6AM.

It would have been impossible to absorb all of the cultural discourse and varied performances in three days along the Amstel. But from African history on stage in the U.S. to Flemish interpretations of Italian films, the Holland Festival and IATC captured the many moods of Amsterdam for its global visitors.

Europe Theatre Prize: Thessaloniki, Greece 2008

I'm just back from Thessaloniki, Greece, a land founded by King Cassander of Macedon back in 315 BC, which was descended upon just last week by theater folks from all over the world. From April 10-13, the small seaside city hosted the honorable likes of Patrice Chéreau, Rimini Protokoll, Krysztof Warlikowski and the Belarus Free Theatre in two theatres.

But many of you Yanks may be wondering (I had been before my Grecian sojourn): Who the hell are those people? Let me start by telling you what the Prize is.

Created in 1986 and presented in '87 as a European Commission pilot program, the Europe Theatre Prize is awarded to artists and theaters whose work is deemed to have contributed to mutual understanding among nations. The European Parliament and the European Council have placed this prize among institutions "presenting a European cultural interest." It has even been awarded to people we know on this side of the Atlantic, like Harold Pinter, Peter Brook, and Robert Wilson.

This year's prize winner was Patrice Chéreau, a French director of theater, opera and film. After accepting the award, he performed a reading of Pierre Guyotat's Coma, a monologue created especially for the Prize ceremony. This 90-minute piece about art, depression and repression was performed in Chéreau's native French with surtitles in Greek and English. With few moments of relief, the piece was a weighty, autobiographical look at Guyotat's own bout with depression in the late 1970s, when he was admitted to a psychiatric clinic. Thierry Thieu Niang directed the reading, which had Chereau on a chair facing stage left and a square of light around him.

The Prize festivities also include an award for New Theatrical Realities. That was given to the German ensemble Rimini Protokoll and choreographer Sasha Waltz and Polish director Krysztof Warlikowski. After a letter-writing campaign to the Prize organizers, the Belarus Free Theatre was given a Special Mention.

The landlocked country of Belarus is the last of the European dictatorships, where free speech is still the stuff of a utopian science fiction. Michael Billington of The Guardian wrote of the group, "Everything about the Belarus Free Theatre is astonishing...they have suffered every form of intimidation and harassment. Their members have lost their jobs in Belarus's state theatres. The work at home is effectively banned...In 2007, fifty people were arrested when police special forces raided a performance at a house in a suburb of Minsk. Security forces, still working under the title of KGB, also regularly film members of the public arriving for one of the outlawed performances."

The “Free Theatre” Project began on March 30, 2005 by Natalia Koliada and Nikolai Khalezin and, they say, "will be ended when the situation in Belarus will be changed from dictatorial regime to democracy."

Jet-lagged and bleary-eyed, I saw the Free Theatre's show "Generation Jeans" my first night in Greece at the Center for Macedonian Studies. Performed by Zhalezin himself, this humorous and honest look at life under dictatorship kept me awake. Through English surtitles, the actor explains to us anglophones a bit about life in Belarus in the 1980s: "We used to buy plastic bags for 3 rubels and sell it for 5. That used to be called speculation. Now it's called business." More than plastic bags, the citizens would vie for vinyl records. There were three tiers: Soviet-licensed records, records made in countries of the Communist bloc, and, the most precious of all, albums pressed in the UK and America. More coveted than plastic bags or even a Rolling Stones album were blue jeans. Wearing those acid-washed denim trousers signified freedom and self-expression. The show played at The Public Theatre here in New York this January, as part of the Under the Radar Festival. I didn't see it then, but am glad I was able to glimpse this Soviet-tinged view there on the Mediterranean.


But why go to Greece and not see a Greek tragedy? Euripides' great, The Bacchae, was a fun, folkloric feast. Presented by the National Theater of Northern Greece under the direction of Tasos Ratzos, the strong Greek cast captured the pastoral frenzy of the fantastic tragedy. My first Greek play seen in Greek. That was quite an experience, and while we weren't in any outdoor amphitheater, the Vasiliko Theater was a lovely substitute.

The European Commission is already deep into the planning the Premio Europa 2009. So start planning your trip to the Thermaic Gulf now.


Photos by Nontas Stylianidis.

PlayFest!: Florida 2008

Believe it or not, there is more to Orlando than Mickey. (Not much but there is some vibrancy outside of Cinderella's Castle.) What brought me to the land of the most famous of all cyrogenically-frozen opium addicts was PlayFest! the unimaginatively-named but sufficiently-interesting festival of new plays. Its full moniker is "PlayFest! The Harriett Lake Festival of New Plays," underwritten by the 84-year-old patroness herself: Harriet Lake.

From February 8-17, 2008 the Orlando Shakespeare Festival is hosting three workshops, 10 readings and one full production of new American theater. (For the difference between a reading and a workshop, click here.) John Pielmeier (Agnes of God) gave a keynote speech and offered a master playwriting class, even if the master himself has been under the radar for two decades or so. I attended as a member of the American Theatre Critics Association, an organization I joined in 2002.

One of the three readings I attended during my brief Floridian sojourn a few weeks ago was Missing Celia Rose by Ian August,a sort of southern mystery piece about a charismatic local (the eponymous Celia Rose) who goes missing in the heat of a Georgia summer in 1921. This was one of the most buzzed-about readings of the festival, with rumors of Mr. August being solicited by some Chicago companies for future production.

Trog and Clay took a Beckettian look into an imagined secret life of Thomas Edison and how the AC/DC battle might have played out in the late 1800s. The 27-year old playwright, Michael Vukadinovich, has already been noticed by The New York Times and The New Yorker for some earlier works. Since the PlayFest readings were not open to review, per se, I won't comment on Trog in particular, but keep an eye out for the ascendant Mr. V in the future.

The last of the readings I caught was for Miss Julie: Freedom Summer. Full disclosure: I did not read Miss Julie in college. I know, it's a terrible admission, but while I was working through the Pirandellian canon, I missed Mr. Strindberg's classic. Mea culpa. But my collegiate laziness certainly helped me relish this adaptation by Stephen Sachs. Other playwrights were disgruntled, and rightfully so, that the cast who performed this reading had, in fact, spent five months in full production prior to PlayFest. It was odd to see a production then reduced to a reading, but I found the Americanized and racial interpretation of this classic story of class division excellent.

Keep an eye out for these and other playwrights who make it to PlayFest! 2009. It might be worth a trip to the land that Disney forgot after all.


[Photo above: Amanda Stephen and Trenell Mooring in Missing Celia Rose. Photo by Rob Jones/Orlando Shakespeare Theater.]

I've Got Seoul: Korea 2006

I have not recovered from my jet lag from my trip to Seoul, Korea. I went to deliver a paper on New American Theatre & Criticism for the World Congress of the International Association of Theatre Critics. While there, I met delegates from nearly 30 nations and got a chance to see a bit of Seoul. I missed out on the all-night karaoke, but I did see some palaces, secret gardens and sipped some mind-blowing tea. Best of all, I attended a shamanic ritual where I saw a pig speared by a pitchfork. (It was dead to begin with, but it was still revolting...and cool.) If that's not theatre, I don't know what is.

O'Neill Playwrights Conference: Connecticut 2006

I just finished up my two week stint as a critic fellow at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center. Renowned for discovering, championing and honing the works of August Wilson, Wendy Wasserstein, Lee Blessing, John Guare and many other playwrights, the Center is a bucolic haven for theater artists. I came to the grounds to study theater criticism with Michael Feingold of The Village Voice, Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, former L.A. Times chief critic Dan Sullivan and the imitable Julius Novick, a brilliant deity among drama critics.

Tonight I witnessed Charles S. Dutton and S. Epatha Merkerson perform selected pieces from the plays of the late August Wilson. Dutton performed with such power, charge, intensity...I have rarely seen an actor this goddamn good. Two of my colleagues called it "life-altering." I can't disagree.

Stratford Festival: Stratford, Canada 2006

I see at least 100 plays a year--probably many more. "The Duchess of Malfi" was one of the most visually-arresting pieces I've ever witnessed. Director Peter Hinton and designer Carolyn M. Smith's interpretation of John Webster's grotesque tale of madness and passion nearly blew the lid off of the Tom Patterson Theatre. The bizarre little venue is a tight, rectangular space, which actually serves as the winter home of the Stratford Badminton Club. Lucy Peacock as the Duchess was riveting.



"London Assurance" was a colorful, wonderful feast for the senses. How can you argue with Brian Bedford? The brilliant man behind the makeup played the French comedy to perfection.

Shaw Festival: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Canada 2006

I can't recall the last time I saw a play that I wanted to go back to the next night. Tadeusz Bradecki's production of "The Crucible," starring the inimitable Benedict Campbell as John Proctor, is riveting. I was quite literally on the edge of my seat. I think I hit the head of the man in front of me at one point.