Endless Knots

The astounding Mona Golabek

Are you in or near Boston? Can you get here by Sunday night? You must.**

"The Pianist of Willesden Lane" is theatre like you've never seen it, music you've never heard played this way, a story that will turn you inside out -- and perhaps give you clues to solving intractable problems of your own (it did for me). And I haven't even mentioned that it's a one-woman performance. One woman. Ninety minutes. A monologue. A concert. The story of one child, one very talented child, who survives the Holocaust because she was told by her mother to "hold on to her music."

Mona Golabek is the performer, the (in real life concert) pianist, author of the book, The Children of Willesden Lane (written with Lee Cohen), and the daughter of that very talented child, Lisa Jura.

As one of the people I went with tonight said, "It's possibly the best play I've ever been to." I agree. And I wouldn't have known about it had I not read this piece in the Boston Globe. A daughter telling a mother's story is power enough but when the story itself speaks to the horror and the glory and the transcendence of humanity all at once, that is art, that is beauty, and that is reason to be alive.

Go. And if you're lucky, you'll witness it in the kind of theatre that we did, merely 100 people, few enough that everyone was virtually in the front row, eye-to-eye with this extraordinary talent. Not to mention the post-performance conversation, tonight with the star speaking with an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor and the local head of the Anti-Defamation League.

Thank you, Mona Golabek, and thank you, Hershey Felder, for your collaboration (he's the director) in bringing Mona's idea to fruition.

**Why do you have to see this by Sunday night? The Boston show at the Paramount closes then, headed next for Chicago, then on to Berkeley apparently, and hopefully one day to New York, London, and the silver screen. I can't imagine that all this won't happen.

"Bucky and [really] Me" - and Ed Hauben and Jeff Stamps on Feb 2

Unless we're blizzard-ed out on Wed, Feb 2, Jeff, Ed, and I will be the post-performance discussion folks following "R. Buckminster Fuller: THE HISTORY (and Mystery) OF THE UNIVERSE" at the A.R.T. in Cambridge.

Specific focus is Margaret Fuller's influence on Bucky - but I would never have met Bucky had it not been for Ed, who worked with Bucky in New York and Carbondale, and Jeff (who introduced me to Ed), whose work, like that of so many others, has been profoundly influenced by the man whose self-description included this very sensible idea: "I Seem to Be a Verb."

Annie DiMario, production dramaturg, will lead the discussion.

"A Visionary's World"--Don Aucoin on the Bucky play

Last one on Bucky, I promise (for a while).

Don Aucoin's review (and Marcus Stern's photos) of “R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe,’’ in today's Boston Globe are spectacular. Aucoin captures the affect of the set, the script, and the actor:

Whether he is simply sitting in a high-backed chair, standing at a table and manipulating geometric shapes to illustrate a point, or bounding about set designer David Lee Cuthbert’s circular, cobalt-blue platform — which, fittingly enough, suggests a swirling cosmos — [Thomas] Derrah conveys Fuller’s perpetual excitement in the workings of the universe and his own remarkable mind.

And Aucoin honors playwright-director D.W. Jacobs's fine lines:

Derrah’s Bucky blends a childlike sense of discovery with a didact’s need to instruct and an aphorist’s knack for making his points in a pithy phrase, viz.: “You have to decide at the outset whether you are trying to make money or trying to make sense, as they are mutually exclusive’’; “All ideologies range somewhere between the Great Pirates and the Marxists, between the fire and the frying pan’’ or “Muscle is nothing; mind is everything. But muscle is still in control of human affairs.’’

Wish all the photos from the Globe were online for you to see. Actually, it's worth buying today's paper if you only read here just to see Stern's cover photo that manages to capture what the stage really looks like.

I leave you with this, the video posted to the ART site (and YouTube) in which Doug Jacobs describes how he came to Fuller and concludes with Allegra Fuller Snyder, daughter of, calling her father "a great teacher to the world." Check.

 

 

Bucky at the ART with Allegra to follow

OK, Buckyheads. Big Bucky moment here in Boston. New play by D.W. Jacobs, "R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe" at ART (tickets here) opens for previews this coming weekend ("Taking measure of a man," nice piece in today's Boston Globe). According to Laura Collins-Hughes's article, it's over 100 numbered and titled sections "each on a different Bucky topic."

And there's a bonus card. Bucky's daughter, Allegra Fuller Snyder, will comment after the Sunday performance. Rare moment of Fulleriana for us fanatics.

 

More on Julius

The ART blog carries news that Ségolène Royal, recently candidate for the French presidency, attended dress rehearsal for Julius Caesar yesterday. And today's Boston Globe has a long and thoughtful review of the play by Louise Kennedy.

Men in suits (or "To write or not to write: part II")

Last night, three bloggers went to the theatre: Paul Levy, who's already posted (thus the title of this post), John Halamka, and me. As Paul explains, we were invited to opening night of Julius Caesar at the ART in Cambridge, Mass., as part of this innovative theatre's community initiatives that include embracing the new media.

I'd been so taken with "The Rep's" last production, Copenhagen (I went twice and blogged about it each time), that I was very excited to be going again. I hadn't read Julius Caesar since college and enjoyed hauling out my 10-pound edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare, with the price still on it: $5.95. My hubby and I tried to find the 1953 film with Marlon Brando as further preparation but instead saw a 2002 version that told the long backstory of Caesar and Rome, with a truly demented Richard Harris playing the role of the prior dictator. I read the play twice and the hubby and I talked about its meaning rather lengthily.

I was ready. And I was more than touched that we were all invited (the Three Musketeer-bloggers and our spice) to the truly scrumptious dinner before the play, which ended with touching remarks from the theatre's acting artistic director, Gideon Lester, about his original meeting with the play's director, and with truly affecting comments from the director himself, Arthur Nauzyciel. Shakespeare, it turns out, and especially this play, is rarely performed in Nauzyciel's native France. Clearly, this man, at only forty, is a force majeure in theatre globally. He's staged plays on racism in Atlanta ("Black Battles with Dogs"), in Iceland, in Greece, in Brazil...the list goes on. His parents were at last night's performance and he was very humble.

So to set the stage properly (so to speak), we have one of the world's greatest plays, directed by one of the world's most significant young directors, performed at one of America's premiere avant-garde theatres. And the food was good. And I was in the company of friends, including a new friend from the theatre who'd originally issued the invitation.

A high bar and it's a crazy production. For a proper review, see "Art, director shake up 'Julius Caesar,'" Megan Tench's piece in yesterday's Boston Globe. Unlike anything you've seen for Shakespeare. In the opening scenes, the men are in tails and, except for the one dressed as Superman who runs around the stage in circles like a two-year-old might, arms akimbo, the one who speaks in graceful sign language, and the Soothsayer who's dressed in black, the men are always in suits, with or without ties, shoes, and jackets at various times. There's a jazz trio (guitar, bass, and a singer) who provide interpretive refrains. There's the quietest "Et tu, Brute" you've ever heard. The stage design includes, at times, a leather couch and modern credenza, a car suspended from the ceiling, and, if you've seen Mamma Mia!, then you know how this production ends. The backdrop is atypical too, mirroring the banked seats of the theatre, resulting in this one-degree off-normal production ending with the performers taking their bows in that direction rather than ours.

None of it was what I expected, Shakespeare seasoned with absurdism, clearly in the hands of a great imagination...and I applaud ART, standing-O style, for taking the risk of inviting in bloggers, not even theatre bloggers, without constraint on what we write. Over to you, John.