Criticultura em Portugal

The Effect , a new play by Brit playwright Lucie Prebble (b. 1981), now playing in the West Village, sets a broad agenda. This dark, offbeat love story is set during a live-in residential clinical trial for a new dopamine agonist designed to treat depression. Like all new drugs, potential side effects must be tested by trying it on "normal" volunteers-- assuming that young people paid to live in a dorm-like setting for a week are normal. The play tackles many controversies, e.g. paid pharma trials, the effect of psychiatric drugs on core personality, and the quasi-ethical cutting of corners sometimes done by investigators eager to observe their desired drug effect. All this plus two young drug volunteers who fall in love (is it drug-induced?) and two researchers with a romantic history. This is a lot of plot twists and agendas to include in a two hour play, and the playwright does manage to do all this at least without confusion, and with some clever twists and turns. But, no...

The Grand Paradise  is the latest immersive "theater" installment for Third Rail Projects, creator of the hit Then She Fell , the Lewis Carroll fantasy-immersion now playing in its third year. This one, staged in a Bushwick (Brooklyn) warehouse, takes you back to the 1970s decadence of Fantasy Island (well, a more R rated version), complete with short shorts, cheesy meditation mantras, facial hair (for men), and obsessive facilitated seeking for your own inner whatever. (Warning, spoilers ahead). You enter the environment with an airline "boarding card", with or without a cocktail (nicely available at a bar at the entrance), and are guided through the darkened tropical environment (sort of like a Club Med in the old hedonistic days) for the next two hours by attractive young actors. Themes include voyeurism (you stare at go-go dancers of your choice and peer through blinds at a young man "finding himself" by stripping naked and bathing in the sea), astro...

Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House  is famous as an early (1879) statement of women's liberation. In it, Nora progresses from a stereotyped "doll"-like daughter and wife into a woman willing to forge her own role in the world. Boldly for the 19th century, she walks out on her husband and two children, without any stated plan or sign of conscience about the consequences on her family. Its easy to see why the play was a shocking hit of its time, but also why Ibsen's younger rival August Strindberg found the play too much about the concluding shock effect, and not terribly realistic (The acerbic Strindberg asked: what is Nora going to do on her departure, without skills or training in the trades? Prostitution?). Seeing it in Brooklyn in 2016, the play is less shocking, but requires a nuanced Nora who makes the transition from doll to independent woman convincingly. Such was not the case at this production by The Theater for a New Audience, directed by Arin Arbus and...

In an earlier blog, I wrote about Die Materie ,   a musical-dramatic-zoological performance at the Armory in Manhattan, whose climax involved 200 sheep on the stage (see my post of 30 March 2016 for more). This immediately came to mind last night when I viewed Au Hasard Balthazar (Balthazar, at random)  by the French director Robert Bresson (1901-1999). This 1960's film is one of his more engaging, telling the multiple sad stories of the prideful, flawed human owners of one donkey (Balthazar, named for one of the Magi). Balthazar mostly lives an ordinary, frequently harsh donkey life, aside from one trip to the circus as a guest donkey mathematician who stomps his hooves to perform complex multiplication problems (is this actually Balthazar's donkey-dream, escaping from his mundane donkey-life?). The film exhibits all of Bresson's characteristics. He uses only nonprofessional actors, who are micromanaged and micro-edited so that they do not distractingly "act" in...