Stage Voices

RICHARD MAXWELL INTERVIEWS ARGENTINE PLAYWRIGHT-DIRECTOR FEDERICO LEÓN

 

(from BOMB magazine, Spring 2013.)

Translated from Spanish by Mónica de la Torre

I was in Buenos Aires in July of 2012 and kept losing my handle on the place. What’s down is up, summer is winter, and vice versa. (As my de facto Jim Fletcher exclaimed, “It’s just like Borges!”) You’re in Latin America at times; at others, in New York City. If you squint at certain cityscapes, you would swear you were in Brussels or Vienna. We like to mash people and places into what we want them to be when, in fact, things are what they are.

The Argentine playwright-director Federico León has been recognized internationally for his rigorous and heartwarming work in theater and film for over a decade. I thought maybe I had a handle on his work, given that we might be the same age and we both direct the plays that we write. I thought this especially after seeing him premiere his show Las multitudes in La Plata, an hour’s drive from Buenos Aires, during my time there. Here, I saw a brokenhearted humanity tale on stage.

Las multitudes is a fable. The characters are archetypes: the grandfather, the mother, the ingenue . . . Yet, in León’s play, each character is played by a dozen people, with one designated leader for each character doing most, if not all, of the speaking.

In December I was able to chat with Federico for the first time. With Mónica de la Torre translating back and forth, I discovered the gaps in my knowledge and the fate of my assumptions. One thing I still think I’m right about: León is to theater what Springsteen is to music. First of all, I love Bruce. When I listen to his songs, I have a picture of who the heroes Frankie or Johnny are. Yet the creator himself is the personification of heroism. The same happens with Federico León: he doesn’t perform, but his realness as writer and director comes through in the work, heroic and unapologetic.

— Richard Maxwell

(Read more)

http://bombsite.com/issues/123/articles/7095

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DAME JUDI DENCH: “THE MOST DIFFERENT THING IS WHAT I LIKE TO DO BEST.”

 

 

(John-Paul Ford Rojas’s interview appeared in the Telegraph, 3/19. Via Drudge Report.)

The 78-year-old actress admitted that it had become “more difficult to remember”.

It emerged last year that she was suffering from a progressive loss of eyesight that meant she now relied on friends to read scripts to her.

Dame Judi’s latest role is in the West End play Peter and Alice, opening next week, which re-imagines a real-life meeting between the two people who inspired the fictional characters Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland.

She stars opposite Ben Whishaw, who appeared with her in the latest James Bond film Skyfall.

(Read more)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-news/9941570/I-take-memory-supplements-to-help-recall-my-lines-says-Judi-Dench.html

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RADIOHOLE INTERVIEW

 

(Barbara Browning’s article appeared in BOMB, Winter, 2012.)

(Barbara reads out loud.) About five years ago, I went with my son, who was 13, to see Richard Foreman’s Zomboid!—we both thought it was terrific. There was a big stuffed ass on the stage, and periodically, a booming voice would inexplicably intone: “Donkey!” In the program notes, Foreman emphatically rejected the notion of a unified meaning to the piece. When the play was over, we walked out, and I said excitedly to my son, “I think the donkey is the beast of burden, which is language, and meaning is the heavy load we keep trying to make it carry!” My son said, “I don’t think the donkey was supposed to mean anything.” Of course he was right. It was an “Aha!” moment rapidly followed by a “D’oh!”

I had precisely this problem when I heard that Radiohole—the brilliant, wacky, and irreducible Brooklyn-based experimental theater company—was working on a production called Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein seems to be tailor-made for Radiohole; a parable of what could be the defining features of their aesthetic: the mash-up and the unorthodox (and seemingly out-of-control) use of technology. The monster’s odd-lot mix of body parts could seem to evoke the company’s collaborative creative process, in which all members’ thoughts, obsessions, and associations become part of any project. Their productions also regularly slam together high and low—a tendency perfectly suited to a Romantic novel that, at this point, is inextricably linked in our imaginations to the 1931 film, not to mention the Mel Brooks remix.

(Read more)

http://bombsite.com/issues/118/articles/6264

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MARTIN MCDONAGH INTERVIEWED BY FINTAN O’TOOLE (BLAST FROM THE PAST)

(O'Toole's article appeared in Bomb magazine, Spring 1998.)

Martin McDonagh, born in London of Irish parents, is one of the most startling and prolific contemporary playwrights. At 27, he has had four new plays open in Ireland and England in the last two years. His Leenane Trilogy—The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West—was staged together by the Druid Theatre of Galway, and at the Royal Court in London. The first play of another trilogy, The Cripple of Inishmaan, was produced by the British National Theater. One play from each trilogy—The Beauty Queen and The Cripple—is being produced in New York this spring at The Public Theater and the Atlantic Theater. Though McDonagh grew up in London, all of these plays are set in the west of Ireland and are written in an Irish idiom. The combination of a pastiche of rural Irish forms and a displaced urban sensibility gives his work a dark, violent, and very funny edge. This interview was done in February in a coffee shop in Manhattan. He had just returned from a trip to Australia, where the Druid production of the Leenane Trilogy had been on tour.

Fintan O’Toole You tend to avoid interviews. Do they make you uncomfortable?

Martin McDonagh It’s kind of scary to analyze my plays like this now, because I didn’t do it before I started writing. The whole premise of interviews frightens me. I’ve said that to you before, I didn’t do self-analysis before I started writing, I’m not doing it much now. I’m doing it more than I should, even though I don’t want to. And not because I choose to, but because this whole process of having to publicize something forces you into these kinds of situations. I’m never unhappy doing them. I’m not unhappy doing this, I’m just tired. You have to either not do it, or stop whinging about it. I’m not whinging about it now. (laughter) But the whole self-analysis, for me, goes against the grain of everything I want to do. I never thought about any of this stuff before I wrote the plays, and I think they’re quite good plays. I think just going on like that is the best way to achieve that process again, to go on without over analyzing.

(Read more)

http://bombsite.com/issues/63/articles/2146

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COLM TÓIBÍN INTERVIEWS TOM MURPHY

 

(Tóibín’s article appeared in Bomb, Summer 2012; the clip above is Murphy with Sean Rocks.)

In Ireland in the 1980s, when I was starting to write, there was a relationship between the Irish theater and its audience that was raw, visceral, and immediate. As new plays came—by Brian Friel, or Billy Roche, or Frank McGuinness (and later by Marina Carr, Sebastian Barry, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, Enda Walsh, and Mark O’Rowe)—there was a sense of real expectation and excitement. And as older classic Irish plays were performed by a new generation of Irish actors, that excitement was also there. Two of this period’s central figures entered our spirit and transformed the country in ways both clear and mysterious: the playwright Tom Murphy, who was born in Tuam in the west of Ireland in 1935, and the director Garry Hynes, almost 20 years younger than Murphy. The two began to work together in the mid-1980s and have come together again to revive three of Murphy’s plays—A Whistle in the Dark, Conversations on a Homecoming, and Famine.

I will never forget the opening nights of other plays by Murphy, such as The Gigli Concert (1983), about a man who wants to sing like Gigli, the writing filled with magic and sour wit and soaring language, and Bailegangaire (1985), where the great actress Siobhán McKenna played an old woman who has a story to tell which she cannot finish, whose ending will liberate her, those around her, and, by implication, the audience too. I will never forget a revival in the Abbey Theatre, directed by Hynes, of Murphy’s first play, A Whistle in the Dark, which had been a West End hit in the early 1960s. Or the first production of Conversations on a Homecoming, in Galway, in 1985, with the brilliant young actors from Druid Theatre doing committed and exemplary work. Or the epic production of Murphy’s play Famine, also in the mid-1980s in Galway, also directed by Hynes. Murphy’s restless imagination, something both soaring and uncompromising in his spirit as an artist, and his belief in the image and in the struggle to achieve raw perfection, make him an example to all of us. He is the writer whom other Irish writers most admire.

— Colm Tóibín

(Read more)

http://bombsite.com/issues/120/articles/6616

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SPEAKING OF TOM O'HORGAN . . . AND GALT MACDERMOT

 

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MICHAEL BILLINGTON ON POLITICAL THEATRE

 

(Billington’s article ran in the Guardina, 3/27.)

"Does political theatre ever have any impact?" That, more or less, was the question that came from the floor during my session with David Hare during the Guardian Open Weekend. I replied that it was pointless to expect political theatre to topple governments or provoke legislation. What it can do, I suggested, is inform, illuminate, entertain, raise awareness: sometimes, if we're lucky, all at once. "I'm glad you answered that," said Hare afterwards. "It comes up at every forum I do. I'm starting to run outof replies."

(Read more) 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/mar/27/p-political-theatre-modern-drama

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'JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR' BLAST FROM THE PAST: 1971 RICE/WEBBER INTERVIEW

 

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EVITA’S BUENOS AIRES

 

(Michael T. Luongo’s article appeared in The New York Times, 3/9.)

EVERY city has its heroes — people who, for whatever reason, leave an indelible mark. Washington is awash in monuments to past presidents. New Yorkers work and live in a grid of ancestral icons: Rockefeller Center, Peter Cooper Village, Astor Place. And Paris is studded with plaques honoring luminaries from Joan of Arc to Victor Hugo to Edith Piaf.

Yet few cities are in thrall to a single person the way Buenos Aires is to María Eva Duarte de Perón.

(Read more)

http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/travel/eva-perons-buenos-aires.html?hpw

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'THE EVENING STANDARD' INTERVIEW (WHEREIN STEPHEN SONDHEIM SAYS HE’S WRITING A NEW MUSICAL WITH DAVID IVES)

 

(Matt Wolf’s article appeared 2/29.)

The master of the modern musical adores London, a city he first visited in 1952, and it's safe to say that the capital more than repays Stephen Sondheim's affections. The veteran Broadway composer and lyricist rarely goes unrepresented on local stages, and it's the Chichester revival of Sweeney Todd, currently in the throes of transferring to the West End, that has brought him here for a long weekend.

He has been invited to attend the new cast recording of his 1979 musical, which famously begins with an exhortation to "attend the tale" of cannibalism, black comedy and revenge. The leads on this occasion are Michael Ball as the single-mindedly murderous Sweeney, and Imelda Staunton as Mrs Lovett, the Fleet Street barber's chirpy yet cunning accomplice.

(Read more)

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/theatre/article-24039487-in-new-york-were-starved-of-plays.do

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