An Enemy of the People
Today was a perfectly wonderful day and my first experience with D.C. theatre. I called the Shakespeare Theatre early this morning, after getting a much needed twelve hours of sleep, to inquire about the student rush tickets for performances this weekend. The box office person was really nice and allowed me to go ahead and make a phone reservation at the rush price of only twelve bucks! So I made the reservation for today at noon and proceeded to get ready and rush out the door.
I took the metro to the Gallery/Chinatown stop and walked a block the the theatre. Getting there early I had time to explore the neighborhood for a bit. After picking up my ticket from will call, I went into a bookshop and coffee shop next door. I found and bought a copy of Neil LaBuute's The Distance from Here, which I have an audition for in a couple of weeks, and had a scone and milkshake for lunch. I then headed back over to the theatre, which had opened the house by then, to see Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. It was fantastic! Much better than I'd presumed it would be. The caliber of acting, overall, was very high in the cast. Something I think is de facto with The Shakespeare Theatre. They have performers such as Kevin Spacey and Patrick Stewart in shows there every so often. But no one extremely famous in this cast, just very well trained and executed. There was one performer in particular, Caitlin O'Connell, who played Dr. Stockmann's wife, who I thought was exceptionally good. She had such realism and true existence in her character throughout. Never, with her, did I feel as if she was "projecting" a performance; orating. But she was so true. Her progression from the happy mother of a rising family to a worried woman, almost maniacal from the surrounding events was flawless. I believed her. This is not to say that the rest of the cast wasn't good, because they all were and deserve commendation, but Ms. O'Connelly just stood out to me. Her performance, I think, followed the method that Uta Hagen implements in her book Respect for Acting. She found the character in herself and went with it. BUT ANYWAY, in other aspects of the production... The set was very interesting and worked very well. There are four settings in this play: the Stockmann home, the printing office of The People's Herald, the meeting hall, and the Stockmann home in ruins. The proscenium was outlined in pipework, the misplaced pipes of the posionous baths. Onstage a center revolve acted as a way to transition locations. One one side was the Stockmann's home, very cold and lower middle class; slowly rising in prosperity. On the other side was the busy printing office of The People's Herald. It worked very well in flow, the transition. During intermission, a flat was lowered at the anteproscenium which mimicked, exactly, the decor and design of the auditorium. This was the setting for the meeting hall, and an ingeneous way to tie the audience in as the "people" of the town! I loved this and the way it worked. Usually audience participatory shows make me agitated and I dislike them, however with Enemy it wasn't as much audience participatory as audience inclusive. The director obviously wanted the people to feel what the audience in the meeting hall would feel. To have the same emotions resulting from the actions onstage. It was ingenous and really did elicit such tension and anticipation from the audience. Palpable. THEN the flat rose to reveal the Stockmann house once more, after the barrage of stones from the townspeople. And it worked perfectly. To go from such an emotionally high point to this crash result of a seemingly smoldering ruin. Very nice. So, in summation, the show was great, an emotional rollercoaster, that I suggest to everyone who has the chance to take a ride on.
Now I'm back home and have been for several hours. I think I'll read The Distance from Here tonight so I can get a feel for the audition and not seem like an unready twit during it. A toute a l'heure!
I took the metro to the Gallery/Chinatown stop and walked a block the the theatre. Getting there early I had time to explore the neighborhood for a bit. After picking up my ticket from will call, I went into a bookshop and coffee shop next door. I found and bought a copy of Neil LaBuute's The Distance from Here, which I have an audition for in a couple of weeks, and had a scone and milkshake for lunch. I then headed back over to the theatre, which had opened the house by then, to see Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. It was fantastic! Much better than I'd presumed it would be. The caliber of acting, overall, was very high in the cast. Something I think is de facto with The Shakespeare Theatre. They have performers such as Kevin Spacey and Patrick Stewart in shows there every so often. But no one extremely famous in this cast, just very well trained and executed. There was one performer in particular, Caitlin O'Connell, who played Dr. Stockmann's wife, who I thought was exceptionally good. She had such realism and true existence in her character throughout. Never, with her, did I feel as if she was "projecting" a performance; orating. But she was so true. Her progression from the happy mother of a rising family to a worried woman, almost maniacal from the surrounding events was flawless. I believed her. This is not to say that the rest of the cast wasn't good, because they all were and deserve commendation, but Ms. O'Connelly just stood out to me. Her performance, I think, followed the method that Uta Hagen implements in her book Respect for Acting. She found the character in herself and went with it. BUT ANYWAY, in other aspects of the production... The set was very interesting and worked very well. There are four settings in this play: the Stockmann home, the printing office of The People's Herald, the meeting hall, and the Stockmann home in ruins. The proscenium was outlined in pipework, the misplaced pipes of the posionous baths. Onstage a center revolve acted as a way to transition locations. One one side was the Stockmann's home, very cold and lower middle class; slowly rising in prosperity. On the other side was the busy printing office of The People's Herald. It worked very well in flow, the transition. During intermission, a flat was lowered at the anteproscenium which mimicked, exactly, the decor and design of the auditorium. This was the setting for the meeting hall, and an ingeneous way to tie the audience in as the "people" of the town! I loved this and the way it worked. Usually audience participatory shows make me agitated and I dislike them, however with Enemy it wasn't as much audience participatory as audience inclusive. The director obviously wanted the people to feel what the audience in the meeting hall would feel. To have the same emotions resulting from the actions onstage. It was ingenous and really did elicit such tension and anticipation from the audience. Palpable. THEN the flat rose to reveal the Stockmann house once more, after the barrage of stones from the townspeople. And it worked perfectly. To go from such an emotionally high point to this crash result of a seemingly smoldering ruin. Very nice. So, in summation, the show was great, an emotional rollercoaster, that I suggest to everyone who has the chance to take a ride on.
Now I'm back home and have been for several hours. I think I'll read The Distance from Here tonight so I can get a feel for the audition and not seem like an unready twit during it. A toute a l'heure!
posted by ~chase at 4:21 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home