One could make the case that theater is potentially the most voluptuous of the arts, considering its special ability to appeal directly to the senses. Only dance can compete with the fleshly and erotic capacities of the stage, and it lacks the thrilling component of the human voice. (When it comes to vocal splendor, theater is of course no match for opera, but it goes without saying that the sensual appeal of opera singers is not primarily visual.) For the past twenty years or so, Martha Clarke has been adapting her choreographic imagination to theater forms precisely, one suspects, because of the way movement, music, and language can be combined to erotic effect. Her works are pulsing with sexuality, but also drenched in morbid images: she never lets us forget how closely Eros and Thanatos are linked.
Vienna: Lusthaus (Revisited) is a new version of a piece that Clarke created in the 1980s in collaboration with Charles L. Mee (book), Richard Peaslee (music), Robert Israel (set and costume design), and Paul Gallo (lights). All of these artists plus one of the original cast members (Paola Styron) are back in fine fettle, demonstrating a great if seldom-practiced imperative of theater: to keep its most vital works, like vintage cars, in a condition of continuous maintenance and fine-tuning.
A reverie that explores early twentieth-century Vienna, the play is based on the nude paintings of Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, the casebooks of Freud, and the dreams of Freud's patients--"the unconscious world," as the program says, "from which our tormented waking world springs eternally." That sounds a little like the preface to Strindberg's A Dream Play, and in truth Strindberg, along with Robert Wilson (a recent Strindberg interpreter), is an additional if unacknowledged influence on Clarke's imagination. In fact, Mee's contribution to the piece is essentially dramaturgical--a pastiche of citations from letters, diaries, and journals-- just as Peaslee's music often quotes from Johann Strauss, Alban Berg, and Bach.
The dreams in Vienna are inspired by a piece of architecture: the Lusthaus, or Pleasure Pavilion, an octagonal structure built in the Austrian capital in the sixteenth century. The Lusthaus is another example of how Clarke's imagination is aroused by visual and erotic stimuli. Sexual love is the subject of the work, sexual love in its various forms--heterosexual, homosexual, narcissistic, incestuous, bestial. For Clarke, fin-de-siecle Vienna represents eroticism (and perhaps also Jew-baiting) in its most abandoned form. After lulling us with the elegant civility of military officers, demure ladies, and Strauss waltzes, she evokes dream images of increasing coarseness and violence.
In a tilted room designed by Israel, the cast of eleven, in company with five musicians (some of whom appear on stage), wearing the designer's blue and red military tunics, white shifts, gray and black dresses, and striking ballroom gowns, enact a series of cryptic scenes behind a scrim that gives everyone a textured look. One officer prances like a horse while two others applaud the dressage. Six women in white discuss their sexual experiences in crude language. A soldier and a maiden compare their sex lives to a train going through a tunnel. A soldier looks down the bodice of his lady love, examines her vagina, spanks her, and drops her to the ground. Another soldier strips a girl down to her black stockings. She is joined by other women in black stockings, evoking memories of Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. A man in long underwear, wearing shoes on his hands, literally becomes his own lover in acts of oral and genital gratification.
This last episode is one of the few retained from the original Vienna. Most of the movement, and almost all of the text, has been newly created. The eroticism has been accentuated, and so has the anti- Semitism. (In one section, a speech in English and German, the latter spoken by the mournful Elzbieta Czyzewska, describes why the Jew is prevented from serving in the infantry and thereby becoming a full citizen: his foot is "so shaped as to render it impossible of walking long distances.") But both versions end the same way, with a query about decomposition--"What colors does a body pass through after death?"--as snow falls on the living and the dead.
The entire company, including the musicians, execute their responsibilities with remarkable poise and command, and the evening is full of strong scenes and unexpected shocks. But the objection I had when I first saw the piece remains. Although it maintains a unified mood, Vienna: Lusthaus does not move sequentially, and thereby sacrifices any cumulative narrative power. As a result, the episodes sometimes seem unanchored, disconnected. But even when your mind is tempted to wander, the work's visual beauty and haunting grace are arresting. This is a theater piece by American artists of rare vision and quality.
The season being summer, it is time for Shakespeare, particularly Twelfth Night, which, along with As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream, is a perennial favorite of outdoor festivals. In my time, I must have endured a hundred nights of Twelfth Night, one of them not that long ago in the very Delacorte Theater where the current version is being staged, the sole offering of the New York Shakespeare Festival's summer season. Like that previous production, which starred Michelle Pfeiffer and Jeff Goldblum, this one is a celebrity gathering featuring a number of movie and television luminaries. Some of these actors, notably those with stage experience, actually have some chops. Others should have been advised not to serve their theater apprenticeships in important Shakespearean roles.
They have not been helped much by their director, Brian Kulick, whose imaginative contribution seems to have been pretty much exhausted by the visual concept. Walt Spangler's attractive design, set against the green-carpeted, moon-drenched background of Central Park, is composed of a majestic blue fun-park scoop that occupies half the stage, on the rest of which sits a derelict wreck of a blue ship with a huge hole in its side. Through this opening can be glimpsed a bit of the cargo-- notably a large nude odalisque--which suggests that Sebastian and Viola might have been engaged in smuggling paintings into the Florentine art market before being shipwrecked in Illyria. The blue ship serves as a prop for the court scenes. The scoop provides the occasion for most of the physical action, which consists mainly of characters sliding down the polished wooden surface on Persian carpets. This is fun for about ten minutes. After the eleventh or twelfth such prank (and virtually every member of the cast gets a shot at it), it begins to grow a trifle tedious.
This Twelfth Night is lovely to look at--Miguel Angel Huidor's colorful nineteenth-century costumes and Michael Chybowski's shimmering lighting are especially attractive. But it lacks a strong interpretive approach other than the way it finds double entendres (otherwise known as Shakespeare's bawdry) in much of the language. Is Kulick trying to prove Viola's belief that "they that dally nicely with words may quickly make them wanton"? To be sure, Twelfth Night has many such verbal allusions, the broadest being the way Malvolio unconsciously spells out a rude word for Olivia's private parts. And it may be that Shakespeare's adolescent weakness for sexual puns is especially riotous in Twelfth Night (like Feste, Shakespeare in his lighter moments is a "corrupter of words").
But the play also enjoys a sensual understructure that is almost entirely ignored in this production. The lesbian implications of Olivia's attraction to a young woman disguised as a boy are hardly touched upon, largely because Julia Stiles's Viola fails to summon up more than a pinched smirk in response to Kathryn Meisle's insistent attentions. With her singsong delivery and immobile features, Stiles is the latest in a Central Park tradition of casting untrained movie stars in ingenue roles, and it does not help her already weak vocal projection that the airlines seem to have timed their shuttles over Manhattan to muffle her speeches. Stiles and the considerably more mature Meisle often seem to be in different plays--or, more accurately, different media. Similarly, although Antonio's passion for Sebastian (Zach Braff) gets some emphasis with the help of a subtle performance by Sterling Brown, the impact of Viola's gender confusion on Orsino's sense of male pride is barely explored. This is not to say that Jimmy Smits's Orsino lacks manliness--he comes off as a very dashing romantic swashbuckler in his red dressing gown and hussar uniform. But once Orsino has established his infatuation with music, the director leaves him nowhere to go. Nor has the composer (Duncan Sheik) provided much in the way of lyrical support. The songs are of indifferent quality, and they are indifferently sung by Michael Potts as Feste.
Where the production finds some strength is in its comic scenes. Oliver Platt as a Dickensian Sir Toby and Michael Stuhlbarg as a spindly Sir Andrew generally form a strong team, looting the beached ship and squirting wineskins at each other. And Christopher Lloyd's Malvolio, a shiny-domed menace out of The Island of Dr. Moreau, is a good foil for their foolery. But considering Lloyd's genius for manic farce, it is puzzling that he seems so restrained here and fails to capture some of the pain and rejection that lies beneath the pompous self-satisfaction of an egregious ass.
By the time this Twelfth Night ends, it seems to be well into its thirteenth night. The production has long since exhausted our goodwill and patience. The recognition scene, in which Viola and Sebastian take about ten minutes to acknowledge that they are brother and sister-- surely this is what Ionesco was satirizing in The Bald Soprano, where a long-married husband and wife have a hard time recognizing each other despite mountains of evidence--seems even more interminable than the one in Cymbeline. We are no longer interested in which Jack gets which Jill, because we've never believed in any of the relationships. There was more sense of the play, and more playful sensuality, in the concluding scene of John Madden's Shakespeare in Love--in which Gwyneth Paltrow, her wet smock clinging to her delicate body, walked from the sea to alight upon the beach of Illyria--than in this entire plodding three-hour evening.