Criticultura em Portugal

Office Hour Written by Julia Cho Directed by Neel Keller Starring Sue Jean Kim, Ki Hong Lee New York Public Theater December 3, 2017   Office Hour was the second of two plays at NY Public Theater that I saw on a recent Sunday, each written by an American playwright associated with “ethnic” themes, and each feeling like it occurred far from Manhattan. Cho, the 42-year-old daughter of Korean immigrants, has created several plays for southern California theaters, and has a gift for creating memorable characters and for dialogue that communicates the conflicting emotions and pressures of the immigrant experience. On the east coast depictions of Asian issues are much less common than of black or Latino themes, so this play was very welcome. It is essentially a two-person play, ninety minutes long, but the “office hour” depicted is a tense session between a troubled, enigmatic young Korean student and his well-intentioned college writing professor, also Korean. Other teach...

The Shape of Water Directed by Guillermo del Toro Starring Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins Guillermo del Toro makes adult fantasy-parable movies, most notably the Spanish-language Pan’s Labrynth (2006), a mystical, dreamy movie about a faun and a woman, all set amidst the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. In some ways, the just-released The Shape of Water is a US version in the same vein. In this film, del Toro sets a “Beauty and the Beast” film in an analogously grim period of US history—the paranoid, McCarthy 1950’s. Unlike the dreamy landscape of the earlier film, this one is all grit and technology gone wrong: the setting is largely an enormous cement bunker in which the CIA performs scientific experiments driven by competition with the Soviet Union, and where Soviet spies are a constant presence. Where the earlier film sought to distinguish a colorful, dreamy fantasy labyrinth with the horrors of war outside, this film is much darker, immersing us in the...

Oedipus el Rey Written by Luis Alfaro Directed by Chay Yew Starring Juan Castano, Sandra Delgado New York Public Theater December 3, 2017 The ancient Oedipus legend, with roots to Homer and before, was very popular among Greek playwrights, most notably Sophocles ( Oedipus Rex , Oedipus at Colonus ) and Euripides. Later re-tellers include the Romans Julius Caesar (yes, he wrote plays) and Seneca, then Dryden and Voltaire. While the twentieth century offers Stravinsky/Cocteau’s wonderful neoclassical operatic treatment, and Freudian Oedipal dynamics were incorporated into such plays as All my Sons and Desire under the Elms , modern adaptations of the legend itself have been rarer.  This is odd, since a son’s subconscious wish to murder his father and seduce his mother was a cornerstone of twentieth century psychology. Perhaps the topic does not resonate well in our time since the Greek notions of the gods punishing hubris and Freudian concepts of our behavior being ...

Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train Written by Stephen Adly Guirgis Directed by Mark Brokaw Starring Sean Carvajal, Edi Gathegi, Ricardo Chavira, Stephanie DiMaggio SignatureTheater The Pershing Square Signature Center November 29. 2017 Jesus Hopped the A Train (2000), a masculine, edgy exploration of criminality, race, and religion, is the second play I have seen by Stephen Adly Guirgis. I also saw his later Pulitzer-winning Between Riverside and Crazy  (2014) in Washington DC a couple years ago, and was impressed by his ability to convey smoldering, repressed anger and resentment hiding in middle class black lives. Guirgis was born of Egyptian and Irish middle-class parents, and grew up in Manhattan’s far upper west side, largely among black and Hispanic kids. He also writes for TV cop dramas and acts in movies, TV, and stage. His nine plays (including the problematically-named The Motherfucker with a Hat) seem mostly driven by giving voices to the underclass of our soci...

Downtown Race Riot Written by Seth Zvi Rosenfeld Directed by Scott Elliot Starring David Levi, Chloë Sevigny Pershing Square Signature Center November 25, 2017 Downtown Race Riot is a new play that joins many others in examining racial tensions from new perspectives, here returning to the grim days of New York City in the 1970’s for inspiration. The set was immediately nostalgic for me; a kitchen/dining room and two bedrooms replete with floral wallpaper and green cabinet paint similar to my parents’ décor of the era. Except for Chloë Sevigny (HBO’s Big Love ) as a strung-out mother getting by with love but little sense, the cast was of young relative unknowns with limited professional credits, all portraying teens and young adults trying to negotiate the turbulence of the era. The play centers on the performance of Jimmy “P-nut” Shannon (an angelic-faced David Levi, second from right below, previously a child star in Nickelodeon’s The Naked Brothers Band ). P-nut is a...