Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:37:06 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Helen Shaw :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Helen+Shaw istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/listening-in-on-mlk/73288/ Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Michael Murphy's paralyzingly dull "The Conscientious Objector" achieves the impossible — it makes a preacher, Martin Luther King Jr., and a president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, sound nearly indistinguishable. The play delves into the last years of King's life, after his most famous speeches were behind him and the hard job of implementation had begun. The iron was hot, but an enormous amount still needed to be hammered out, including registration protection and open housing. But King (D.B... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/radar-roundup/69966/ Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:09:31 EST When curator Mark Russell calls his festival "Under the Radar" — implying a certain smallness — don't believe him. His once-scrappy festival is now an established fact at the Public Theater, commanding huge crowds, many of them out-of-state producers shopping for their seasons. New Yorkers know Mr. Russell's taste well — he swoons for densely verbal solo acts, movement-rich dance-theater hybrids, and anything that requires complicated venue restrictions — this year's festival's "Small Metal... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/dancers-at-play/66529/ Thu, 15 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST A man and woman collide, slapping into each other without rancor. There is a blackout. When light returns, the two dancers are still there, the woman cheerfully unfolding a long leg, the man bouncing, straight-legged as a pogo stick. This is pair-work without drama, and theatrics without weight. It's also an energizing way to spend 100 minutes. The three sections of Ohad Naharin's work, "Three," currently at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, are organized only loosely into principles. The first... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/with-miraculous-agility/64830/ Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST Nacho Duato and his Spanish troupe Compañía Nacional de Danza are now at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, performing three of Mr. Duato's pieces — 1996's "Por Vos Muero," 2002's "Castrati," and 2001's "White Darkness." As the choreography flashes through styles (Is someone really krumping during that gavotte?) and the dancers move in ways the brain can scarcely stand to process, whose cumulative invention, dexterity, expressivity, and speed can induce vertigo. This is simultaneous physical and... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/steppenwolfsthree-headed-chick-lit/64101/ Mon, 8 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST The Chicago-based Steppenwolf theater company has a Manhattan parallel at the Atlantic theater company, but New Yorkers still drool over the idea of a theatrical collective that can afford to keep its members at least intermittently employed. Luckily for New Yorkers, Steppenwolf has developed First Look New York Repertory — thoroughly work-shopped pieces that receive their nominal premiere here. This time, though, they haven't sent over the new Sam Shepard or Tracy Letts, meaty plays full of... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/sweet-prince-has-a-good-night/63348/ Tue, 25 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST For the serious actor, performing Shakespeare becomes the consuming project of his age. Even the least Elizabethan among them finds it impossible to let those scripts alone — last year we saw Ann Bogart's company take up "Macbeth," and we will soon see the futuristic Wooster Group tackling "Hamlet." No small fuss has been made over the visiting Trevor Nunn-Ian McKellan "King Lear," in part because it feels like an education in how to "speak the speech." In one place in New York, however, the... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/making-their-names-in-mud/62772/ Mon, 17 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST Too few of the pieces from the Festival d'Avignon manage to claw their way past customs and into New York. The Edinburgh Fringe gets 10 times the coverage in this country, since many of its cheap, tourable productions are panting for American exposure. Festival d'Avignon, though, despite being the Cannes of theater festivals, is relatively ignored here. What Stateside theater, struggling along on its nonprofit status, could afford to bring over those operatic, state-funded spectaculars? So the... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/performing-on-the-high-seas/61590/ Thu, 30 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST The dance rehearsal might have looked like any other: One dancer bent another into a cheerful spin as she marked through a jazzy number; a chorus of male hoofers soft-shoed in a line behind them. And then dancer Rob Besserer casually adjusted his anti-seasickness bracelet. Such is life when rehearsing on a barge. Last week, down at Miller's Launch on Staten Island, the cofounder of the avant-garde Mabou Mines company, Ruth Maleczech, was staging the company's "Song for New York," which begins... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/so-you-think-you-can-choreograph/60397/ Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST Twelve years ago, a gaggle of experimental directors working at Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater asked choreographer Annie-B Parson to conduct a choreography workshop for non-dancers. Ms. Parson, the Bessie, Obie, and Guggenheim Fellowship–winning co-director of Big Dance Theater, had trained several waves of rising directors and performers at New York University's Experimental Theatre Wing. But very few people outside of the program had ever seen her teach. That long ago... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/finding-truth-in-tragedy/60391/ Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST Nigeria has been in the news again lately, and not for pleasant reasons. Just last week, 18 men were sentenced to death by stoning under an edict of Sharia law. Clearly, this is a place that doesn't suffer outsiders, so it took considerable bravery for young, white, theater-making Dan Hoyle to show up and start asking questions. Funded by a Fulbright fellowship, he nosed around one of Africa's touchiest powder kegs, asking questions about the saltpeter nexus between politics, local strife, and... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/on-the-fringe/59913/ Mon, 6 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST The New York International Fringe Festival, with its cheap, abundant plays, can be an experimental theatergoer's dream. But with its 200-plus options, phonebook-size guide, rocky record for quality, and August schedule, it can also be a sweaty nightmare. So if you can't face another Sophie's Choice between a rock opera about rats or the latest clown offering from France, here are a few offerings that — due to pedigree or sheer audacity — have already lifted their heads above the haze. Since... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/return-to-many-forms/59187/ Thu, 26 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST Shen Wei has been deploying his wistful choreography at Lincoln Center Summer Festivals for some time now — his work appeared there for three consecutive years, between 2003 and 2005. So his reappearance could mean that the curators are playing it safe. But Shen Wei Dance Arts, best known for Mr. Shen's chilly, thrilling "Rite of Spring," has jumped forms. With the opera "Second Visit to the Empress," Mr. Shen returns to his roots in Chinese classical opera, a form that he left in the late '80s... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/twin-twin-situation/58472/ Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST Sometimes the only way to look at the scope of human misery is to focus on its tiniest component — so the Chilean company Compañía Teatro Cinema places its "Gemelos" on a stage roughly the size of a four-poster bed. The miniature jewel box theater, with its luscious red velvet curtain and sliding dovetailed sets worthy of Drottningholm, creates a warm, wooden womb for the actors. They work in half-masks like commedia dell'arte characters, and move with a jerky waddle, like wind-up Charlie... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/tours-force/57908/ Fri, 6 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST Say you've just arrived at Mexico City with a large dance company. Everyone is rattled: The plane almost crashed, the suitcase with the costumes has mysteriously gone missing, and the presenting venue blithely mentions that tomorrow, a citywide strike will lock you out of your performance space. What do you do? If you're Shen Wei Dance Arts, you make do. Lighting Supervisor John Torres and Production Manager Will Knapp pulled doubletime in the theater, taking hits off the backstage oxygen... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/when-age-is-an-asset/57245/ Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST Watching the 59-year old Mikhail Baryshnikov perform with his Hell's Kitchen Dance company offers all of us a bit of false hope: for those minutes, age and change can't scare us. It isn't that Mr. Baryshnikov shows no signs of the passing years; it's simply that his precision and grace refuse decay in ways that athleticism and flexibility do not. Maturity, for several moments, seems the better bargain. As preparation for their tour, Mr. Baryshnikov and his small company performed two of their... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/theatrical-field-trip/56961/ Wed, 20 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST While some outdoor theater takes to the parks, the Peculiar Works Project takes to the streets. Last year, the group's Obie Award–winning "West Village Fragments" fused a walking tour of the West Village with scenes from off-off Broadway's early classics. Now, the group casts its gaze eastward with "OFF Stage: The East Village Fragments," currently in session. The 1960s East Village saw the development of some of theater's greatest talents, including onetime fixtures like the Off-Bowery... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/last-song-for-lost-things/56817/ Tue, 19 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST When performance artist and director Lee Nagrin died on June 7 at age 78, her final work, "Behind the Lid," became her eulogy. It had always been intended as a summing-up piece, autobiographical and dreamlike, but now it will have to suffice as her final word. For a woman who understood her position outside the mainstream, one who, in her program note, referred to herself as a "sibyl," "Behind the Lid" faithfully represents her strangeness, her sureness, her sincerity, and her vanishing way of... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/rioult-treading-in-familiar-waters/56528/ Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST For dance fans huddling in away from the storm Tuesday night, the Pascal Rioult Dance Theatre at the Joyce provided a cozy harbor. Mr. Rioult's two remounted hits, the duet "Black Diamond" and the effervescent "If By Chance," consoled the soggy viewer with charming, geometric patterns. But Mr. Rioult also presented two new works, the faux-hip "Exp #1" and the faux-religious "Symphony of Psalms," and both, despite their technical cleanliness, fell into deep ruts at the conceptual level. In past... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/summer-guide/all-the-summers-a-stage/55083/ Wed, 23 May 2007 00:00:00 EST Theater can be a tough sell in the summer. Sitting on a sticky seat while you fan yourself frantically with a program? Trying to score a tan from an overzealous lighting design? It's enough to make even the most dedicated theatergoer scamper off to the beach. But comb through the offerings carefully enough and you might just find some things worth sticking around for, and all without getting sand in your suit. The gorilla in the living room is, as always, the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/table-setting/54483/ Tue, 15 May 2007 00:00:00 EST One-man shows are almost always about division. How else can one speaker get up the requisite dialectical steam to keep an audience interested? The most popular (and played-out) method is to talk about an identity-split—solo performers believe their private struggles with race, sexuality, and religion will rivet others to their seats, and they usually woefully overestimate our interest. But in "American Fiesta," a relatively gentle example of the species, Steven Tomlinson has a bigger division... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/brothers-of-invention-2007-05-14/54373/ Mon, 14 May 2007 00:00:00 EST The "Inventors" segment of the encyclopedic La MaMa Moves festival rests entirely on the work of two choreographer-dancers: Christopher Williams (a rising star at Fall for Dance, and known for his Petrushka in Basil Twist's production) and his onetime teacher, Douglas Dunn. Seeing their works side-by-side (or, in the wee La MaMa Club Theater, cheek-by-jowl), we can see the tenacious linkages between the dance generations, the ways instructors bear their students along with them for a while... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/services-tendered/54192/ Thu, 10 May 2007 00:00:00 EST Brits off-Broadway, the Anglophile's dream theater festival, has once again cantered into 59E59. And getting it off to a cracking start is "The Receipt," an inordinately adorable piece by Will Adamsdale and Chris Branch, the same actor-musician team that last collaborated on 2005's "Faster" and "Jackson's Way. " Although this outing can't be summed up as neatly as their earlier hits, this slightly sloppier show lays the groundwork for better things to come. "The Receipt," despite oozing charm... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/rock-in-a-hard-place/53921/ Mon, 7 May 2007 00:00:00 EST It sounds like a stunt. A funky downtown company, known and loved for its opaque, irreverent texts, decides to become a band. They get the requisite MySpace page, a four-month crash course in musicianship, and a "gig" at P.S. 122. Yet when Banana Bag & Bodice takes the stage as the strung-out rockers the Rising Fallen, they leapfrog past spoof and into something like opera. True, they make a rocky show — amps hiss and speeches occasionally drag, and, as with many bands, there seems to be one... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/redeem-this-ticket/53935/ Mon, 7 May 2007 00:00:00 EST Lately there has been a veritable flood of religiously themed theater productions. Lear deBessonet pokes into the neurological burps that create religious fantasists in "TransFigures," and Mick Gordon's "On Religion" at Columbia University took the scholarly approach. Now Young Jean Lee, as hip, interestingly perverse, and postpost-Existentialist as you could wish a downtown artist to be, has, after a lifetime of stonewalling her parents' intense evangelical faith, written a church service... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/taken-on-faith/53029/ Mon, 23 Apr 2007 00:00:00 EST The next time you're wading through tourists curb-deep outside "Phantom of the Opera," wishing you could substitute serious thinking for that synthesized drum beat, head to a university. Recent shows at Columbia and Princeton, in particular "On Religion," which was performed Friday and Saturday nights at Columbia, have blazed trails that the pokier professional theaters are slow to follow. Perhaps for college kids, there's something thrilling about a medium in which "argument" is synonymous... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/easy-breezy-barton/52899/ Fri, 20 Apr 2007 00:00:00 EST It seems churlish to fuss about the current production of Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal — after all, the company offers an undeniably sunny experience in a week that can use the warmth. An undemanding, breezy program, its enjoyable double bill poses none of the Big Issues, existing solely as a celebration of movement and pattern. But it does exhibit the perils of the visiting choreographer. Despite its willingness under the artistic director, Louis Robitaille, to ignore the word "jazz"... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/sex-falls-and-videotape/52608/ Tue, 17 Apr 2007 00:00:00 EST Pavel Zustiak's company Palissimo has tried this once already. Back in December, when Mr. Zustiak's piece "Le Petit Mort/Now It's Time To Say Goodbye" was in rehearsals at P.S. 122, one company dancer fell off a ladder and another ripped his meniscus while preparing for the show. That scarred knee belonged to the indispensable dancer Saar Harari, and so his injury sidelined the production until spring. It's a good story — because, of course, Mr. Harari is back in fighting shape. But it also... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/more-questions-than-dancers/50606/ Fri, 16 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST The Buglisi Dance Theater (formerly known as Buglisi/Foreman) has an impressive pedigree. Founded by a group of dancers who met in Martha Graham's company, it contains and continues the spirit of modernism in ways many younger companies have simply left behind. The group's movement vocabulary recalls Graham's gestures — the same grand dame melodrama, the same slow-motion, sideways collapses, which in turn echo the stepping-stones of a Frank Lloyd Wright design. Two of the company's original... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/treading-gently-in-gray-areas/50120/ Fri, 9 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST Although Spalding Gray took his own life in 2004, in a way he had been doing that all along. The monologuist of such tide-turning works as "Swimming to Cambodia" and "It's a Slippery Slope" had always taken his own life — as material, as muse, as the prime pump of his artistic output. No one could have lived a more "examined life" than he did; no one had obsessed so publicly and eloquently about its shape and inevitable ending. So his suicide didn't come as a surprise —just as a tragedy. For... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/shinns-message-loud-clear/49757/ Mon, 5 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST Boil down the message of Christopher Shinn's Lincoln Center two-hander "Dying City" and you wind up with a familiar theme. Bad parents warp their kids. Let the psychoanalytic camps slap each other with the nature versus nurture paddles if they must, but a quarter-century of doggedly insistent "Oprah Winfrey" specials can't be wrong. Look behind the man mistreating you today, you'll find a bad dad throwing punches in the past. At its heart, therefore, the psychology of "Dying City" is hugely... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/citizen-pain/49679/ Fri, 2 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST On a blank stage, lit solely by massive overhead industrial lighting, crowd members struggle. They pin one another in wrestling holds, reverse swiftly away from a man having a deconstructed seizure, and then freeze, creating snapshot after snapshot of a people set against itself. The only sounds are bodies thudding onto the floor and the rasp of labored breathing, punctuated with sharp, suspenseful silences. This unaccompanied, but profoundly musical, sequence in William Forsythe's work "Three... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/upstaging-a-seductress/49172/ Fri, 23 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST Choreographer Ramón Oller has no illusions about how many "Carmens" there have been — he goes out of his way to tot them up in the program. He leaves out a few —Beyoncé Knowles in the MTV version? — but he makes his point. Every culture eventually makes its move on the famous temptress; even Merimée's original story was a Frenchman's campy take on Andalusian gypsy life. In his production that opened at the Joyce on Wednesday night, Mr. Oller and his Compañía Metros try to seduce Carmen back to... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/infantilizing-the-audience/48944/ Tue, 20 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST Courtney Baron's "A Very Common Procedure" is an easy experience. Slick and buffered, with no burred edges to catch at the mind, it passes as easily as an hour in front of the TV. Of course, this borders on the bizarre, because the "procedure" is an infant's bungled heart operation, and for 80 minutes we must watch the bereaved parents grieve, lash out, and generally fall apart. And yet, it's a breeze. Since gawking at other people's accidents defines our nightly entertainment, the greedy... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/shooting-at-the-hip/48847/ Fri, 16 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST It isn't just Broadway that crawls with movie remakes and jokey spoofs — south of 14th Street, you'll find plenty of kickboxing musicals or ironic takes on the gossip pages. And when shows aren't guffawing, they're desperately trying to echo Whitman's primal scream, either with barbaric audience treatment or cheekily transgressive texts. While good work can emerge in either genre, it's still a refreshing change to see Canadian theater group SaBooge ignoring the "hip" impulses and creating work... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/not-the-mann-he-once-was/48334/ Fri, 9 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST About 40 minutes into choreographer John Neumeier's adaptation of Thomas Mann's novel "Death in Venice," the repressed Aschenbach (Lloyd Riggins) encounters a mysterious stranger. Dressed in denim and aviator shades, the Wanderer is actually two men dancing as one, joined by the strap of their shared satchel. He/They will infect Aschenbach with a yen for travel, making the first, menacing tug on the laces of his tightly wound character. But rather than seeming like an eerie encounter with... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/girl-talk/47794/ Thu, 1 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST About two-thirds of the way through Tamar Rogoff's "Edith and Jenny," an adolescent exercise about exercising adolescents, Claire Danes finally delivers some text. Since most of the audience knows Ms. Danes as an actress from film ("Shopgirl") or television ("My So Called Life") rather than as a modern dancer, it should have been a welcome relief. Instead, a nervous titter rippled through the audience as she gamely shouted,"Your Mama's got a date tonight!" and hopped up and down like an... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/not-quite-under-the-radar/47095/ Mon, 22 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST Mark Russell must be able to bend time and space — despite having at least five shows going on in the city on a given day, he popped up, chortling, at all of them. And no wonder. His three-year-old Under the Radar festival, now a fixture at the Public, has taken on a welcome air of permanence. The acts, while still eclectic, are increasingly viewer-friendly, highly polished, and poised for triumphant tours (which is why presenters, wearing massive plastic badges, swarmed them like hopped-up... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/riding-a-wave-of-radical-fun/46646/ Mon, 15 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST When the avant-garde kicks down the fourth wall, hog ties dramaturgical structure, or starts playing really loud music, it's usually trying to make the audience uncomfortable. Radical performances want complacent audience members shifting on our cushions, confused and questioning all our cherished old ideas. But the lovable scamps at Radiohole, while rooting around in the same bag of tricks, do it all in search of a communally good time. Sure, there's a superficial divide between those on the... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/birthing-pains-of-nations/46218/ Mon, 8 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST By the end of Josh Fox's "You Belong to Me," Part V of his massively ambitious Death of Nations project, you know how the nations must be feeling. Bludgeoned and battered, your patience evaporated, you feel like snuggling down in a nice casket and giving up the ghost. As an indictment of bellicose nationalism and a formal homage to (among others) Robert Wilson and David Lynch, "You Belong to Me" has its functional, even triumphant, moments. But in sending up the arrogance and overindulgence... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/making-his-move-toward-serious-work/45525/ Thu, 21 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST Sometime in the middle of Charles Atlas's stunning video for Richard Move's new dance work, "Toward the Delights of the Exquisite Corpse," an image we have seen repeatedly — a sleeping woman's face cradled by two hands — suddenly turns menacing. The hands, which seemed to belong to a lover, creep rather than caress, and the woman bolts screaming awake. Mr. Move's program of serious pieces, his momentary farewell to the delirious camp that has made him famous, isn't quite that alarming. But... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/don-juan-disaster/45351/ Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST If the layman knows one thing about Don Juan, it's that the guy likes to screw around. Show him a girl, and he'll woo at her until she succumbs — or until he has to kill her dad and drag her off by her hair. But even Don Juan and his overactive libido would have begged out of the matches set up for him in "Don Juan in Prague," the "Don Giovanni" adaptation staged this weekend at Brooklyn Academy of Music. It's hard to stay lusty when you look like you just kicked your way out of a brawl between... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/wearing-out-its-welcome/44842/ Fri, 8 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST At what point does delightful irreverence start to seem a little coy? In the case of David Parsons, that time is now. The cavalcade of Parsons pieces at the Joyce, full of his bouncing, enthusiastic movements and uncritical sentimentality, have a cumulatively wearying effect. If we saw only one of his numbers, perhaps sandwiched between the works of other, more serious choreographers, his work might retain some freshness. After all, the key to telling a joke is getting out of it with speed, and... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/pilot-crashes-due-to-pilot-error/43978/ Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:00:00 EST In the bowels of the Manhattan Theater Club, director Lynne Meadow is desperately stretching a tidy, thought-provoking little playlet into an evening-length drag. David Greig's "The American Pilot" is a play that would work best at a fast clip, since it's a story about a situation going downhill, fast. But played at a plodding, portentous pace and busted into two 40-minute acts, this "Pilot" can't achieve takeoff speed. Somewhere in the hills of a war-torn country — Mr. Greig keeps us guessing... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/wild-duck-goosed/42492/ Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST Ibsen, already at his centennial, can sometimes feel rather more like a chore than a joy. Old Henrik's works, so many of them rigorously moral and admonishing, can go down like medicine. But in a fresh, speedy, nearly pell-mell production of "The Wild Duck" that just finished spreading its wings at BAM, the National Theater of Norway trims the fat off the bird, ruthlessly razoring out Ibsen's insistent repetition of his themes and morals. What's left behind, paradoxically enough, are his themes... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/godot-arrives-exactly-as-expected/42289/ Thu, 26 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST Everything is perfectly realized in the world of the Gate Theatre Dublin's production of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" at the Skirball Center. The troupe is working in its comfort zone (having toured this same production to New York in 1996), with actors well rutted into their roles, and a director (Walter D. Asmus) who once worked for the great Sam himself. The production is seamless and occasionally elegant, and the lobby talk at intermission kept throwing up the word "definitive." But... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/one-mans-constellation-of-characters/42100/ Tue, 24 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST First: Go ahead and disregard the title of "Emergence-See!" Daniel Beaty's one-man show is far, far better than its uninspiringly punny title would suggest. In fact,"Emergence-See"is such a rousing, bruising panoply of being black in New York that I spent a significant amount of post-show time thinking of a title that would better coax audience members into the Public Theater. A constellation of characters revolve in New York, all familiar and some of them dear. There is Rodney, a slam poet... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/obsession-made-compulsively-watchable/41950/ Fri, 20 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST Falling into Sarah Michelson's intelligent, transfixing new piece "DOGS" is a little like going on a drunken bender and then waking up, a bit groggy, in a Soho design store. The work is a profoundly discombobulating trip inside Ms. Michelson's mind — from the painful farewell-to-youth epilogue to the careful stenciling on every floor tile, "DOGS" seems to be Ms. Michelson's detail-obsessed, peripatetic brain turned inside out. Certainly her face, or rather, the bright pink outline of her face... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/shallow-even-in-the-deep-end/39891/ Tue, 19 Sep 2006 00:00:00 EST Choreographer Noémie Lafrance is clearly a good talker. In order to present her most recent piece, Agora II, she had to cajole Brooklyn park officials into letting her go into the detritus-filled, abandoned McCarren Park Pool, bring it back from the brink of demolition, and then stage a dance piece in it with a cast a hundred-strong. Admittedly, this is a coup she won last year, when she staged the first Agora in the empty basin, but still, the woman has fast-talked her way around a load of... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/shaky-foundation/39821/ Mon, 18 Sep 2006 00:00:00 EST It's a good thing that "Lemkin's House" has its heart in the right place. Because nothing else in Catherine Filloux's hot mess of good intentions, tonal wackiness, and misleading dead ends even comes close to the mark. There are otherwise staunch actors, forced to muscle meaning out of haphazard dialogue; there are the horrors of the 20th century, trotted out as scenery. And in the center of it all is a conceit so wet, so abysmally misguided, that it squelches any intensity the actors (or the... HELEN SHAW http://www.nysun.com/arts/reprieve-from-festival-fatigue/39500/ Tue, 12 Sep 2006 00:00:00 EST If you are beginning to suffer from festival fatigue, there is a cure. Of course, it's another festival: Dancenow/NYC, a refreshingly speedy array of short pieces (all under seven minutes) that acts like a cool sorbet after the summer's "smorgasbords." Dancenow/NYC's curators, Robin Staff and Tamara Greenfield, have collected work from over 85 choreographers into loosely themed aggregations. At last week's Base Camp, emerging dancers got their moments in the sun. This coming week, a show called...