John Cassavetes' Husbands
Theatrical Adaptation of John Cassavetes'Husbands
2010
Under the Radar Festival
Directed by Doris Mirescu of Dangerous Ground Productions (PHOTOS)
Production Manager Crichton Atkinson
2010
Under the Radar Festival
Directed by Doris Mirescu of Dangerous Ground Productions (PHOTOS)
Production Manager Crichton Atkinson
Looking Ahead: Theater
At the Under the Radar Festival, beginning Wednesday, Dangerous Ground Productions offers a theatrical riff on John Cassavetes's 1970 movie, “Husbands.”
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: December 31, 2009
UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL
January is always stock-taking time, and when the beginning of the year is also the beginning of a decade, you can expect wall-to-wall self-examination. But few exercises in introspection are likely to have the extroverted flair of the Under the Radar Festival, one of New York’s most venturesome (and international) gatherings of experimental-theater artists.
This year’s offerings, which run Jan. 6 to 17 at the Public Theater and other Manhattan performance spaces, dissect a multitude of subjects cultural, political, physical and cosmic, with a particular emphasis on very free-handed documentary and archival approaches. The avant-garde veterans Anne Bogart and Charles L. Mee are reassembling “American Document,” Martha Graham’s 1938 probing of this Puritan country’s past, while “Chautauqua!,” from the National Theater of the United States of America, takes its stylistic cues from the lecture circuit of the late 19th century.
Dangerous Ground Productions translates John Cassavetes’s “Husbands,” a milestone in improvisational film of the 1970s, into the language of theater. Andrew Dawson, a British director and performer, does his own solo (and technology-free) interpretation of a documentary on the Apollo 11 moon landing in “Invisible Atom.” A Brecht classic learns to sing contemporary pop in “Versus — In the Jungle of the Cities,” from the Nowy Teatr of Poland. And Richard Maxwell, New York’s leading auteur of the theater of disaffection, promises to drag video recordings into the third dimension with “Ads.”
Expect to cross into the fourth, fifth and other dimensions before the festival ends. BEN BRANTLEY
The Under the Radar Festival runs Jan. 6 to 17 at various Manhattan performance spaces. Information: undertheradarfestival.com.
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: December 31, 2009
UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL
January is always stock-taking time, and when the beginning of the year is also the beginning of a decade, you can expect wall-to-wall self-examination. But few exercises in introspection are likely to have the extroverted flair of the Under the Radar Festival, one of New York’s most venturesome (and international) gatherings of experimental-theater artists.
This year’s offerings, which run Jan. 6 to 17 at the Public Theater and other Manhattan performance spaces, dissect a multitude of subjects cultural, political, physical and cosmic, with a particular emphasis on very free-handed documentary and archival approaches. The avant-garde veterans Anne Bogart and Charles L. Mee are reassembling “American Document,” Martha Graham’s 1938 probing of this Puritan country’s past, while “Chautauqua!,” from the National Theater of the United States of America, takes its stylistic cues from the lecture circuit of the late 19th century.
Dangerous Ground Productions translates John Cassavetes’s “Husbands,” a milestone in improvisational film of the 1970s, into the language of theater. Andrew Dawson, a British director and performer, does his own solo (and technology-free) interpretation of a documentary on the Apollo 11 moon landing in “Invisible Atom.” A Brecht classic learns to sing contemporary pop in “Versus — In the Jungle of the Cities,” from the Nowy Teatr of Poland. And Richard Maxwell, New York’s leading auteur of the theater of disaffection, promises to drag video recordings into the third dimension with “Ads.”
Expect to cross into the fourth, fifth and other dimensions before the festival ends. BEN BRANTLEY
The Under the Radar Festival runs Jan. 6 to 17 at various Manhattan performance spaces. Information: undertheradarfestival.com.
Live cameras zig-zag across the stage projecting multiple images onto the set while video editors create a spontaneous film backdrop that renewed itself each night. Anders Nilsson accompanied the performance with guitar ambiance ranging from subdued to static. He played himself and a character without a name, an extra, a musician waiting in a hotel lobby for a room, waiting for three hours as though out of time. Actively static, his echoing guitar was the liminal realm between reality and the mind. Three men traveled from America to Europe and back again, escaping their lives, their wives, and with luck, their mortality. They are men, played by boys dressed as men, childishly throwing off responsibility, freeing themselves through drink and brotherhood in a foreign location, this time London, but it could be anywhere other than home, other than the trappings of middle class America, and the rotten relationships upheld for the sake of routine. A few days are explored in the lives of these men on a bender coping with the death of their best friends. They wake up to their own frustrations and desires for pleasure and freedom. The spontaneous directing style of John Cassavetes, adapted for the stage by Doris Mirescu, was the door through which these stage actors entered, presenting raw emotion, avoiding stage theatrics, and bringing a wild awaking to the stage.