Theater

The boldest representatives of New York, Johannesburg and London theater and opera visit Paris in October: Richard Foreman’s raucous Ontological-Hysteric Theater pulls no punches with its latest show “Hotel Fuck!,” Athol Fugard and the Market Theater revive “The Island,” a defiant cry from apartheid South Africa, and Deborah Warner directs the opera “Diary of One Who Vanished,” by Czech composer Leos Janacek, in a new translation by Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney.

The End of Sex: “Hotel Fuck!”
Despite its deliberately provocative title, “Hotel Fuck!,” by off-Broadway’s reigning iconoclast, the 62-year old writer/director/designer Richard Foreman, is the offspring of rather more innocent influences. “The inspiration actually was an old Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney musical where they get together and say, ‘Hey kids! Come on! Let’s put on a show!’” Foreman said in an interview. “Well, I imagined all these idiotic, adolescent Americans — because we’re all adolescents, myself included — saying, ‘Hey! Come on everybody! Our lives are boring! Let’s go to the Hotel Fuck!’”
In his 46th play (produced in the US under the tamer name “Paradise Hotel” due, in the words of its author, to “American puritanism”), four horny guys do exactly that. But even the lewd encouragement of the establishment’s resident madame can’t take them to whatever paradise they hoped to reach. Therein lies Foreman’s point: all this talk of sex, business of sex, culture of sex, in America especially, doesn’t deliver what it promises. In fact, what Hotel Fuck advertises is actually nothing more than the inanity of popular attitudes toward this most private, most essential aspect of ourselves. While “the aesthetics are sophisticated,” Foreman explained, the show is “based on my perception that most people are kind of stupid about sex.”
This leader of the theater avant-garde’s mission to strip American culture of its façades has earned international attention thanks to an inimitable style that is equal parts aggressive and playful. Nothing looks or sounds like Foreman’s postmodern world, cluttered with odd objects and traversed by strings, through which the Ontological-Hysteric’s actors race about, slamming into the set and whacking each other on the head to the cacophonous beat of whistles, buzzers and bells. From Foreman’s first play “Angelface” (1968), where he cast non-actors to stare motionless from a bare stage at the audience while coldly repeating pre-recorded dialogue, to “Rhoda in Potatoland” (1975), in which he challenged himself to stage an uncut passage from his journal, and again to what he has termed the “Dionysian frenzy” of shows like “Miss Universal Happiness” (1985), this philosophic prankster has been straining hard at the boundaries of theater convention through the many stages of his artistic vision. But what does it all mean?
“The fact that multiple stages of being exist in us at all times is what I’m always trying to express,” he has said. “For me, the task in art has always been to be open to all the ambiguities, all the counter factors in a situation. The fact is that when you say ‘yes,’ you’re also saying ‘no,’ and you’re also saying a million other things. In general, the theater, the realistic theater, seems to me to have difficulty suggesting this very basic fact about human existence.”
Foreman’s theater is a reaction to what he sees as the fundamentally hysterical nature of bourgeois theater whereby the audience’s emotional response to what happens on stage is conditioned by society. Neutralizing this pre-existing code of conduct is the purpose of the Ontological-Hysteric’s frenetic antics.
“Art is a perspective,” according to the O-H’s founder. “All perspectives are lies about the total truth. So art is a lie that, because it is strategically chosen, wakes people up. The truth is in the individual’s awakened perceptions. It’s not in the work of art.”
While audiences have been known to run from Foreman’s experiments (frightened, precisely, by what they have perceived?), on the whole his theater has enjoyed a devoted public following over the years. And what with nine Obie awards, a National Endowment for the Arts Distinguished Artist Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement in Theater and a MacArthur Fellowship (otherwise known as the “genius grant”), Foreman has been amply rewarded by the critics. In Europe, this NYC native is perhaps best known in Paris, where he set up a branch of his theater for six years, from 1979 through 1985, with funding from the French government, and where he lived with his American-born, Paris-bred wife Kate Mannheim.
Remembering his expat period, during which he wrote and/or directed and designed six productions in French and rubbed shoulders with the French literary avant-garde, Foreman still waxes enthusiastic. However, like many an American artist abroad with a real commitment to change back home, the need to repatriate proved too strong. He explained: “I could never understand why Henry Miller ever left Paris if he hated America so much. And then I reached a certain age and I realized I can’t deny I’m an American. I could never be a Frenchman and I had to fight my battle here essentially even though in many ways I liked Paris better.”
With Foreman describing “Hotel Fuck!” as “my most narrative and my most accessible play” and predicting that future works will become even less text-based and even more incoherent, now is a good time to catch this American original heading full steam into the next millennium.

The End of Apartheid?: “The Island”
Peter Brook’s International Centre for Theater Creation and the Market Theatre of Johannesburg begin this month an entire season of South African drama at the Bouffes du Nord, starting with the story of two inmates of Robben Island, the infamous prison that was Nelson Mandela’s home for almost half a century. Ten years after Mandela’s release and five years since this political prisoner became the country’s first president chosen though democratic, multiracial elections, can “The Island,” written collaboratively in 1973 by the white liberal playwright/director Athol Fugard and two black actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona, still pack a punch?
At a recent presentation of the Bouffe’s upcoming theater program, which will include the production in French of two other plays penned during the apartheid era, “Sizwe Bansi is Dead,” by the same Fugard/Kani/Ntshona team, and “The Suit” by the late Can Themba, Brook spoke at length of the timelessness of these works, each one driven by a universal myth. In “The Island,” that age-old story is “Antigone,” a version of which inmates John and Winston perform for a prison concert. The parallels between those punished for fighting apartheid and Antigone, sentenced to death by a proud king for having buried the corpse of her brother in defiance of a royal edict, are impossible to ignore. If Winston’s final words as the condemned woman resonated all too clearly when Mandela was black South Africa’s martyr behind bars (“Gods of our Fathers! My Land! My Home!/Time waits no longer. I go now to my living death,/because I honored those things to which honor belongs.”), they remind us today of yesterday’s victims of apartheid and those still suffering the throes of a complete transition to a fair and just society.
Braving the system merely to be written (multiracial theater was forbidden under apartheid), “The Island” traveled to London and New York in 1974 where it received rave reviews not only for the snippets of life “inside” it brought to the world beyond but for the mesmerizing performances of Kani and Ntshona. Over 20 years later, with the real difficulties and dangers of daily life in South Africa still poorly appreciated abroad, the revival of “The Island” by its creators is our opportunity to finally hear its beautiful music of barriers breaking down.

One Who Vanished
In “The Diary of One Who Vanished,” one of England’s hottest directors, Deborah Warner, teams up with the UK’s fastest rising opera star, tenor Ian Bostridge, and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, who translated from the Czech Leos Janacek’s libretto, to tell the story of a young man’s pursuit of a beautiful gypsy girl. The project is Warner and Bostridge’s second together, after their excellent “Turn of the Screw” from 1998. Better known for her dramatic collaborations with actress Fiona Shaw, Warner has not failed to make a name for herself in the opera world; her “Wozzeck” (1996) was called “one of the great opera productions of our day” by the Times.





	music \| dance \| theater \| movies \| artNews

Richard Foreman's Onthological Hysteric Theater		Hotel F ** !* by Molly Grogan Contemporary theater pushes the limits The boldest representatives of New York, Johannesburg and London theater and opera visit Paris in October: Richard Foreman’s raucous Ontological-Hysteric Theater pulls no punches with its latest show “Hotel Fuck!,” Athol Fugard and the Market Theater revive “The Island,” a defiant cry from apartheid South Africa, and Deborah Warner directs the opera “Diary of One Who Vanished,” by Czech composer Leos Janacek, in a new translation by Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney. The End of Sex: “Hotel Fuck!” Despite its deliberately provocative title, “Hotel Fuck!,” by off-Broadway’s reigning iconoclast, the 62-year old writer/director/designer Richard Foreman, is the offspring of rather more innocent influences. “The inspiration actually was an old Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney musical where they get together and say, ‘Hey kids! Come on! Let’s put on a show!’” Foreman said in an interview. “Well, I imagined all these idiotic, adolescent Americans — because we’re all adolescents, myself included — saying, ‘Hey! Come on everybody! Our lives are boring! Let’s go to the Hotel Fuck!’” In his 46th play (produced in the US under the tamer name “Paradise Hotel” due, in the words of its author, to “American puritanism”), four horny guys do exactly that. But even the lewd encouragement of the establishment’s resident madame can’t take them to whatever paradise they hoped to reach. Therein lies Foreman’s point: all this talk of sex, business of sex, culture of sex, in America especially, doesn’t deliver what it promises. In fact, what Hotel Fuck advertises is actually nothing more than the inanity of popular attitudes toward this most private, most essential aspect of ourselves. While “the aesthetics are sophisticated,” Foreman explained, the show is “based on my perception that most people are kind of stupid about sex.” This leader of the theater avant-garde’s mission to strip American culture of its façades has earned international attention thanks to an inimitable style that is equal parts aggressive and playful. Nothing looks or sounds like Foreman’s postmodern world, cluttered with odd objects and traversed by strings, through which the Ontological-Hysteric’s actors race about, slamming into the set and whacking each other on the head to the cacophonous beat of whistles, buzzers and bells. From Foreman’s first play “Angelface” (1968), where he cast non-actors to stare motionless from a bare stage at the audience while coldly repeating pre-recorded dialogue, to “Rhoda in Potatoland” (1975), in which he challenged himself to stage an uncut passage from his journal, and again to what he has termed the “Dionysian frenzy” of shows like “Miss Universal Happiness” (1985), this philosophic prankster has been straining hard at the boundaries of theater convention through the many stages of his artistic vision. But what does it all mean? “The fact that multiple stages of being exist in us at all times is what I’m always trying to express,” he has said. “For me, the task in art has always been to be open to all the ambiguities, all the counter factors in a situation. The fact is that when you say ‘yes,’ you’re also saying ‘no,’ and you’re also saying a million other things. In general, the theater, the realistic theater, seems to me to have difficulty suggesting this very basic fact about human existence.” Foreman’s theater is a reaction to what he sees as the fundamentally hysterical nature of bourgeois theater whereby the audience’s emotional response to what happens on stage is conditioned by society. Neutralizing this pre-existing code of conduct is the purpose of the Ontological-Hysteric’s frenetic antics. “Art is a perspective,” according to the O-H’s founder. “All perspectives are lies about the total truth. So art is a lie that, because it is strategically chosen, wakes people up. The truth is in the individual’s awakened perceptions. It’s not in the work of art.” While audiences have been known to run from Foreman’s experiments (frightened, precisely, by what they have perceived?), on the whole his theater has enjoyed a devoted public following over the years. And what with nine Obie awards, a National Endowment for the Arts Distinguished Artist Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement in Theater and a MacArthur Fellowship (otherwise known as the “genius grant”), Foreman has been amply rewarded by the critics. In Europe, this NYC native is perhaps best known in Paris, where he set up a branch of his theater for six years, from 1979 through 1985, with funding from the French government, and where he lived with his American-born, Paris-bred wife Kate Mannheim. Remembering his expat period, during which he wrote and/or directed and designed six productions in French and rubbed shoulders with the French literary avant-garde, Foreman still waxes enthusiastic. However, like many an American artist abroad with a real commitment to change back home, the need to repatriate proved too strong. He explained: “I could never understand why Henry Miller ever left Paris if he hated America so much. And then I reached a certain age and I realized I can’t deny I’m an American. I could never be a Frenchman and I had to fight my battle here essentially even though in many ways I liked Paris better.” With Foreman describing “Hotel Fuck!” as “my most narrative and my most accessible play” and predicting that future works will become even less text-based and even more incoherent, now is a good time to catch this American original heading full steam into the next millennium. The End of Apartheid?: “The Island” Peter Brook’s International Centre for Theater Creation and the Market Theatre of Johannesburg begin this month an entire season of South African drama at the Bouffes du Nord, starting with the story of two inmates of Robben Island, the infamous prison that was Nelson Mandela’s home for almost half a century. Ten years after Mandela’s release and five years since this political prisoner became the country’s first president chosen though democratic, multiracial elections, can “The Island,” written collaboratively in 1973 by the white liberal playwright/director Athol Fugard and two black actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona, still pack a punch? At a recent presentation of the Bouffe’s upcoming theater program, which will include the production in French of two other plays penned during the apartheid era, “Sizwe Bansi is Dead,” by the same Fugard/Kani/Ntshona team, and “The Suit” by the late Can Themba, Brook spoke at length of the timelessness of these works, each one driven by a universal myth. In “The Island,” that age-old story is “Antigone,” a version of which inmates John and Winston perform for a prison concert. The parallels between those punished for fighting apartheid and Antigone, sentenced to death by a proud king for having buried the corpse of her brother in defiance of a royal edict, are impossible to ignore. If Winston’s final words as the condemned woman resonated all too clearly when Mandela was black South Africa’s martyr behind bars (“Gods of our Fathers! My Land! My Home!/Time waits no longer. I go now to my living death,/because I honored those things to which honor belongs.”), they remind us today of yesterday’s victims of apartheid and those still suffering the throes of a complete transition to a fair and just society. Braving the system merely to be written (multiracial theater was forbidden under apartheid), “The Island” traveled to London and New York in 1974 where it received rave reviews not only for the snippets of life “inside” it brought to the world beyond but for the mesmerizing performances of Kani and Ntshona. Over 20 years later, with the real difficulties and dangers of daily life in South Africa still poorly appreciated abroad, the revival of “The Island” by its creators is our opportunity to finally hear its beautiful music of barriers breaking down. One Who Vanished In “The Diary of One Who Vanished,” one of England’s hottest directors, Deborah Warner, teams up with the UK’s fastest rising opera star, tenor Ian Bostridge, and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, who translated from the Czech Leos Janacek’s libretto, to tell the story of a young man’s pursuit of a beautiful gypsy girl. The project is Warner and Bostridge’s second together, after their excellent “Turn of the Screw” from 1998. Better known for her dramatic collaborations with actress Fiona Shaw, Warner has not failed to make a name for herself in the opera world; her “Wozzeck” (1996) was called “one of the great opera productions of our day” by the Times. “Hotel Fuck!,” Tue-Sat, Oct. 1-9, 8:30pm, Sun, 3:30pm; Maison des Arts André Malreaux, pl Salvador Allende, Créteil, M° Créteil Préfecture, tel: 01.45.13.19.19, 40-100F. “The Island,” Tue-Sat, Oct. 6-23, 8:30pm & Sat 4pm, Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, 37 bis bd de la Chapelle, 10e, M° La Chapelle, tel: 01.46.07.34.50, 80-140F. “Diary of One Who Vanished,” Oct 28-30, 8:30pm, MC93 Bobigny, 1, bd Lénine, Bobigny, M° Bobigny-Pablo Picasso, tel: 01.41.60.72.72, 80-140F.


The Island