The first time I heard of Theatre Movement Bazaar was through their collaboration with The Theatre @ Boston Court.
T@BC kicked off its 2012 season with The Treatment - TMB's adaptation of Anton Chekov's short story "Ward 6." It was strong start to the season, with comedy, dance, music and a deep existential reflection on imprisonment and freedom: when are we really free? Who is free? Where is the border between genius and madness?
This amazing show really made me think about how imprisonment is a state of mind - much more so than a physical state of being, and how we fall prey to our own thoughts and our own genius.
It reminded me so much of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, an existential text about how intelligent men become paralyzed by their own intellect, while ignorant men become men of action.
... But this post is about Anton's Uncles ... excuse the tangent ...
Suffice to say that we loved TMB so much, that The Mead specifically requested we follow them; he felt (and Scooter and I agreed) that we needed to see more of that, of words and stories being interpreted not only through words but movement. An amazing conversation with Tina Kronis, Richard Alger, and Mark Skeens confirmed that these were talented folks who were going to produce work we just couldn't miss - and Anton's Uncles would be Tina and Richard's next show, featuring Mark again!
So even though this meant we'd have to travel an hour to get there and an hour to come home, we got our tickets about a month or two ago for yesterday's show.
Anton's Uncles is based on another Chekov story, "Uncle Vanya," and it's essentially about how a professor has a new - much younger - wife, and how they move to the estate that Vanya (the brother of the professor's first wife) has been running for years.
We found some of the same Chekovian themes (feeling trapped being a key one), and loved the movement and use of props. While TMB had more resources for staging at T@BC, they were given a very spare, small set-up at the South Coast Repertory - but they utilized every inch of it, especially with a rug that became so many different things as the play progressed.
One of the most striking things is that the character of the professor's wife is not present in the play. Well ... she's "present," but not in the traditional way. She has a music theme that plays every time she pressumably walks past the men, who watch her from indoors as she takes a stroll outside. Every time she passes by, they stop whatever they were doing, enthralled, entranced ... proclaiming their unrequitted love to her. Her music, in essence, becomes the missing character.
I particularly enjoy the "absence" of this woman, who is hailed as "remarkable" and whose youth and beauty is being wasted on a man a couple decades her senior. I love that TMB hasn't given us a physical representation of what this remarkable being looks like, allowing us to fill in our blanks ...
... that is until they are then populated by the random selection of a female audience member!
This show is going to London next, and perhaps even China, but I really hope it returns to the LA area at some point. It's a shame it was only on for four days because I would've seen it many more times. I've been regretting the fact that I only saw The Treatment two or three times, and it pains me that I got to see only this one performance. Alas ...
Theatre Movement Bazaar: www.theatremovementbazaar.org
The Theatre @ Boston Court: www.bostoncourt.org
T@BC kicked off its 2012 season with The Treatment - TMB's adaptation of Anton Chekov's short story "Ward 6." It was strong start to the season, with comedy, dance, music and a deep existential reflection on imprisonment and freedom: when are we really free? Who is free? Where is the border between genius and madness?
This amazing show really made me think about how imprisonment is a state of mind - much more so than a physical state of being, and how we fall prey to our own thoughts and our own genius.
It reminded me so much of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, an existential text about how intelligent men become paralyzed by their own intellect, while ignorant men become men of action.
... But this post is about Anton's Uncles ... excuse the tangent ...
Suffice to say that we loved TMB so much, that The Mead specifically requested we follow them; he felt (and Scooter and I agreed) that we needed to see more of that, of words and stories being interpreted not only through words but movement. An amazing conversation with Tina Kronis, Richard Alger, and Mark Skeens confirmed that these were talented folks who were going to produce work we just couldn't miss - and Anton's Uncles would be Tina and Richard's next show, featuring Mark again!
So even though this meant we'd have to travel an hour to get there and an hour to come home, we got our tickets about a month or two ago for yesterday's show.
Anton's Uncles is based on another Chekov story, "Uncle Vanya," and it's essentially about how a professor has a new - much younger - wife, and how they move to the estate that Vanya (the brother of the professor's first wife) has been running for years.
We found some of the same Chekovian themes (feeling trapped being a key one), and loved the movement and use of props. While TMB had more resources for staging at T@BC, they were given a very spare, small set-up at the South Coast Repertory - but they utilized every inch of it, especially with a rug that became so many different things as the play progressed.
One of the most striking things is that the character of the professor's wife is not present in the play. Well ... she's "present," but not in the traditional way. She has a music theme that plays every time she pressumably walks past the men, who watch her from indoors as she takes a stroll outside. Every time she passes by, they stop whatever they were doing, enthralled, entranced ... proclaiming their unrequitted love to her. Her music, in essence, becomes the missing character.
I particularly enjoy the "absence" of this woman, who is hailed as "remarkable" and whose youth and beauty is being wasted on a man a couple decades her senior. I love that TMB hasn't given us a physical representation of what this remarkable being looks like, allowing us to fill in our blanks ...
... that is until they are then populated by the random selection of a female audience member!
This show is going to London next, and perhaps even China, but I really hope it returns to the LA area at some point. It's a shame it was only on for four days because I would've seen it many more times. I've been regretting the fact that I only saw The Treatment two or three times, and it pains me that I got to see only this one performance. Alas ...
Theatre Movement Bazaar: www.theatremovementbazaar.org
The Theatre @ Boston Court: www.bostoncourt.org
I really enjoyed both TMB performances. At least I had multiple viewings of The Treatment. And it is great to incorporate more movement/dance into our selection of play-going.
ReplyDeleteHere's to more TMB!
We'll have to check out their upcoming stuff, once they get back from touring. I think there will be more Chekov movement in our future :)
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete