The Brooklyn Rail
Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture
October 2007
Theater
The New Garde
by Alan LockwoodTheater
When TR Warszawa brings Krum to BAM’s NextWave this month, it will be both director Krzysztof Warlikowski’s second appearance at the festival, and the opening half of the company’s latest incursion into Brooklyn’s theater scene. In October 2004, Warlikowski’s concerted, intermissionless The Dybbuk haunted the Harvey Theater, then in November, TR artistic director Grzergorz Jarzyna’s raucous Risk Everything—busting at its seams with a punk vibe and a bad bloodlust—spilled out of St. Ann’s Warehouse’s glass side door and onto the brick street. This time around, Warlikowski takes the autumn spotlight with Krum’s bout into family underpinnings, then in June 2008, the company returns to occupy Dumbo’s roofless, pre–Civil War Tobacco Warehouse, across Water Street from St. Ann’s, for Jarzyna’s flagrantly ambitious 2007 Macbeth.
Taylor Mac's The Young Ladies Of...
by Nick ChaseTheater
Taylor Mac is a New York-based playwright and performer. His work, including Red Tide Blooming and The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac, has been staged locally at spaces including PS122, The Public Theater and The Spiegeltent. Internationally, he has performed at The Sydney Opera House, London’s Soho Theatre, Battersea Arts Center Theatre and Stockholm’s Sodre Teatern. He was the premier recipient of the Ethyl Eichelberger Award, as well as a playwriting fellow with The Ensemble Studio Theatre’s New Voices program. Mac is currently a HERE Arts Center Resident Artist, where his new play, The Young Ladies Of…, (director, Tracy Trevett) will run from September 26–October 19.
No Matter Where You Go, There You Are
by Joseph CermatoriTheater
Since 2002, Temporary Distortion has created productions that vex the boundaries between live theater, sculpture, installation, and, most recently, film and video. Their last five projects shared a scenic concept that has become the group’s trademark: a large boxlike structure composed of industrial piping, plexiglass facing, fluorescent tubing, light bulbs, undisguised microphones, surveillance cameras and video monitors.
Every Word Ever Written…and One
by Justin BoydTheater
Jason Grote’s 1001 is a story about stories—stories as identity, stories as culture, stories as survival, stories as everything: fantasy and reality, hope and despair, creation and annihilation (and so much more).
Rape, Shame and Suicide
by Roger BabbTheater
Kabuki, the highly stylized, spectacular theatre of Japan, has over its four hundred year history become codified, sacralized and elevated to the status of a national treasure. It has the equivalent position of Grand Opera in Italy, Kathakali in southern India, Shakespearean performance in England and perhaps the National Football League in the United States. All of these performance forms have humble origins. They were under constant constraint from civil authorities and were publicly sanctioned as a moral danger to their communities.
