an earthy take on a heavenly book - the new york times

An Earthy Take on a Heavenly Book - The New York Times

http://theater.nytimes.com/.../reviews/job-at-the-flea-theater.html?ref=theater&_r=0moc.semityn.retaeht&pagewanted=print[9/20/2012 9:51:37 AM]

September 19, 2012THEATER REVIEW

An Earthy Take on a Heavenly BookBy BEN BRANTLEY

God moves in unmysterious ways at the Flea Theater these days. There he was, manning (if that verb may beso applied) the box office on the night I arrived to see Thomas Bradshaw’s “Job,”in which he plays animportant supporting role to the notoriously afflicted title character. And there was God’s son, Jesus, servingas an usher downstairs.

Of course I didn’t realize then that was who they were. Their identities were made known later, when thisultimate father-and-son team (as embodied by the actors Ugo Chukwu and Grant Harrison) showed up in theplace you expect them to be, heaven. That’s heaven as imagined in Mr. Bradshaw’s short, sharp andvigorously comic tragedy, which opened on Wednesday night. But even then there was no avoiding the feelingthat these guys are just like us — only more so. Which in Mr. Bradshaw’s universe isn’t necessarily a goodthing.

Or a bad thing. The 32-year-old Mr. Bradshaw — one of the most deliberately and effectively confrontationalAmerican playwrightsof his generation — specializes in portraits of an id-driven world in which crimesagainst nature are more or less natural and presented without obvious moralizing or head shaking.

Incest, pedophilia and racially motivated murder all figured matter-of-factly in his “Burning,”staged inManhattan last year, as they had in previous plays like “Southern Promises” and “Purity.”Mr. Bradshaw hasdescribed his deadpan sensational style as “hyperrealism,”or “reality without the boring parts.” In hisuniverse, human behavior is unedited, uncensored, often uncivilized and largely unexplained.

So it seems fitting that when Mr. Bradshaw looks for the divinity that governs this old vale of tears, he shouldsimply find more of the same. The Book of Job,which asks the eternally troubling question of why good peoplemust suffer, may have inspired more elaborate theological and philosophical debate than any other part ofthe Old Testament. But in Mr. Bradshaw’s “Job” God’s motives are as simple, blunt and opaque as those ofthe mortals he created in his image. On earth as it is in heaven, indeed.

The plot of “Job” hews closer to the Biblethan you might expect. As in the original version God decides to testthe faith and constancy of his most loyal servant, the righteous Job, by stripping him of his wealth, his familyand his health. And as in the original version it is Satan who urges God to do so. Mr. Bradshaw’s script alsouses passages of human lamentation and divine utterance taken more or less directly from the Old Testament,some of the most beautiful poetry ever written.

Much of the rest of the play, which runs roughly an hour and is directed by Benjamin H. Kamine, suggests ariff that the Book of Job might inspire in an imaginative, latter-day adolescent who reads it for the first time.And it’s this sense of seeing something familiar and epochal with wise-virgin eyes that makes “Job” a joltingtreat. Mr. Bradshaw tears away centuries’ worth of interpretations and debate to tell the story of Job (a



magisterially stern Sean McIntyre) as a bloody, Quentin Tarantino-esque tale, laced with graphic violence andfillips of frat-house humor.

Yes, “Job” occasionally seems like a goofy, impious blackout sketch by a 21st-century undergraduate. (AaronGreen’s set and Ashley Farra’s costumes archly bring to mind a religious pageant in a high-end boardingschool.) But the script also evokes a more distant time, when deities were mortals magnified. And it shrewdlyelicits the similarities between ancient Greek mythology and Old Testament theology. In this version God (Mr.Chukwu) is a jovial, Jovean figure, hanging out in eternity with his sons Jesus (Mr. Harrison) and Dionysus(Eric Folks), whom their father plans to send to earth some day, though at different times and to differentplaces.

Satan (a perfectly smug and resentful Stephen Stout), God’s brother, drops in to visit, and this heavenlyhousehold is filled with laughter and bickering, sibling rivalry and fraternal bear hugs. If these beings aremore capricious and less careful than the people on earth, with whose destinies they play as if they were videogames, that’s because they need never fear painful consequences. (You may infer parallels with today’seconomic 1 percent, if you choose, but Mr. Bradshaw isn’t asking you to.)

Job, in contrast, registers as almost forbiddingly responsible. We first encounter him meting out justice with aseverity tempered by kindness to a world that is just this side of bestial. Jeremy Bloom’s sound design is filledwith the bleats and moos of livestock, some of which, we are always aware, are fated to be holy sacrifices. Andthe supplicants who come to him are dirty, sometimes bloodied and, you suspect, filled with the potential forviolence.

When God unleashes Satan on the tenuous order of Job’s world, things fall apart fast, in the lurid style thatMr. Bradshaw favors. (This is not, repeat not, a play for children.) The calamities that befall Job are no poeticabstractions but graphically rendered atrocities that include the murder and posthumous rape of his daughterby his son and Job’s castration and blinding by mutinous former subjects.

These horrors, punctuated by lively ritualistic dances on both heaven and earth (choreographed by JoyaPowell), are given unflinching and unwinking life by the Bats, the Flea’s company of young resident actors. Asoverseen with a smart, unswervingly straight-ahead style by Mr. Kamine, their performances are unusuallyfree of psychological flourish, as they deliver dialogue that, even in moments of great crisis, is often as banaland everyday as a grocery list.

The critic Margo Jefferson has astutely observed that Mr. Bradshaw operates on the principle that “ourpsyches speak in what our egos and rational selves call clichés.” Our depth, it would seem, is only on thesurface; we’re all one in our most basic desires.

Mr. Bradshaw has often said that he writes dialogue that has no subtext. In his plays people are as they are,hungry creatures who act on appetites and itches and urges. In “Job” he logically extends that description toembrace their maker as well.

By the way, Job does learn from his sufferings in this version. The man we see restored to power and glory atthe end is more Godlike than ever. That in itself is a cause for Job-like lamentation.

Job



Written by Thomas Bradshaw; directed by Benjamin H. Kamine; sets by Aaron Green; costumes by AshleyFarra; choreography by Joya Powell; lighting by Jonathan Cottle; sound by Jeremy S. Bloom; fight director,Michael Wieser; makeup and special effects by Justin Tyne; stage manager, Courtney Ulrich. Presented by theFlea Theater, Jim Simpson, artistic director; Carol Ostrow, producing director; Beth Dembrow, managingdirector. At the Flea Theater, 41 White Street, TriBeCa, (212) 226-2407, theflea.org. Through Nov. 3. Runningtime: one hour.

WITH: Jaspal Binning (Joshua), Edgar Eguia (Matthew), Adam Lebowitz-Lockard (Jonas), Sean McIntyre(Job), Jennifer Tsay (Rachel), Marie-Claire Roussel (Esther), Bradley Anderson (Andrew), Layla Khoshnoudi(Miriam), Ugo Chukwu (God), Stephen Stout (Satan), Grant Harrison (Jesus), Eric Folks (Dionysus), JimmyDailey (David), Cleo Gray (Sarah), Timothy Craig (Messenger), Ivano Pulito (Jeremiah), Alex Coelho(Joseph), Abraham Makany (Son 1), Chester Poon (Son 2), Nicolle Medina (New Wife) and Christin Eve(Young Woman).

Stark, Minimalist and Beckett All Over - The New York Times

http://theater.nytimes.com/...ter/reviews/sounding-beckett-at-the-classic-stage-company.html?ref=theater&pagewanted=print[9/20/2012 9:52:36 AM]

September 19, 2012THEATER REVIEW

Stark, Minimalist and Beckett All OverBy ANITA GATES

She could be Miss Havisham. This ageless ghost of a woman with long, scraggly gray hair, dressed in atattered, once-elegant gown, shuffling — noisily, rhythmically — back and forth across a bare floor in thegrowing dark. But Miss Havisham is a Dickens character and a villain, while May (Holly Twyford), thewoman we see onstage, is a Samuel Beckettcharacter and a leading lady. And while Miss Havisham is theeternal spurned bride, May is the eternal daughter. She has an elderly, bedridden mother who speaks in thetones of a cruel god (the voice of Kathleen Chalfant).

“Sounding Beckett,” which completes its short run at the Classic Stage Companyon Sunday, is a far cry from“Waiting for Godot” or “Happy Days,” that playwright’s cheerfully absurdist midcentury tributes to the battleagainst despair. The three short plays that make up this program — they’re not usually presented together —were written in the last decades of Beckett’s life, the 1970s and ’80s, his minimalist period. Maybe it’s mostaccurate to think of this as extreme Beckett.

In “Footfalls” we learn that May has not left the house (literally) since her girlhood. Her mother chides hermore than once, “Will you never have done — revolving it all in your mind?” And Beckett leaves it to us to fillin the blanks about what is torturing her.

The two men (Ted van Griethuysen and Philip Goodwin) in “Ohio Impromptu” have long gray hair and wearwhat looks like black religious garb; they are seated at a table while one reads to the other. The second manreacts only by slamming his fist on the table periodically. Beckett wrote them as doppelgängers; I mistookthem for a gay Amish couple with power issues.

The final play, “Catastrophe,” was written as a comment on totalitarianism and political martyrdom. Theprotagonist (Mr. van Griethuysen), a frightened, trembling elderly man, is manipulated and humiliated by avicious director (Mr. Goodwin). What kind of director? We are never told. Sometimes the setting seems morelike a museum than a theater or soundstage. This is a heartbreaking piece with a happy but upsetting ending.

“Sounding Beckett” is directed by Joy Zinoman, the founding artistic director of the Studio Theater inWashington (she stepped down in 2010), who chose the plays and has staged them with a glamorousstarkness and a clear respect for the works’ purity. They alternate with original musical compositions thatthey inspired, performed live and with a haunting intensity by the Cygnus Ensemble.

an earthy take on a heavenly book - the new york times

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