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The real reason I'm praying that
"Hairspray," the Broadway musical based on my 1988
movie, succeeds is that if it's a hit, there will be high
school productions, and finally the fat girl and the drag
queen will get the starring parts.
-- John Waters
What is great theater? The component parts are brains, good taste, fine craftsmanship, high purpose, and so forth and so on, but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and comes to us as a single impression which is at once intellectual satisfaction and emotional entrancement. Our theatre is a place where, normally, the silence is broken by nothing more coherent or congenial than the clatter of dishes in a sink, but once in a long while something like a great bronze gong is heard, reminding us that reality and the art that transposes it in the theatre are not banalities beneath our contempt but mysteries worthy of our reverent attention…
Commercial art is as smooth, rounded an unexceptionable as an egg, while true art by contrast has something offensive about it, something imperfect and, possibly, maddening. That is why one’s dislike of a play by Arthur Miller is much more of a compliment that one’s inability to dislike the latest little commercial comedy.
-- Eric Bentley
My work still perplexes some people (others have been devoted followers for more than 30 years), but I remain grounded in the tradition of Molière — to me the greatest of all theatrical artists. And I am still driven by the example of great poets like Paul Celan, and powerful thinkers like Ortega, Heidegger and Lacan. Under their influence, I enter the final rehearsals of my latest play, meditating on the conservative nature of our contemporary world, where a bottom-line mentality rules and shapes most of the work being done in the arts. As one to whom the 60's gave permission to re-examine the rules of my discipline, I am still committed to the search for an artistic form that escapes the cocoon of our comfortable, entertainment- drugged mind-set.
Perhaps that's why recorded layers of simultaneous language return to my work in
Maria del Bosco. The implied question also returns: Do any of us really speak for ourselves? Or are we forever trapped inside the multiple languages of past experience that we can never escape? The characters inside my play do try to escape through impulsive behavior. They dance maniacally, trying to forget themselves. But in fact, no one ever escapes. Appropriately, the last line of the play is the insistent refrain: "Resist the present! Resist the present!"
-- Richard Foreman
Nightclub Cantata
was the start of [Karen Kandel’s] collaboration with [Elizabeth] Swados that lasted for five shows over as many years, including
Alice in Concert with Meryl Streep and Swados’s groundbreaking collection of testimonials by and about the youth of the late ‘70s,
Runaways, which started as a scrappy workshop at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater and eventually moved to Broadway.
Working with the iconoclastic Swados served as a kind of lengthy internship for Kandel, giving her a chance to establish a style and an ability to deal with complex and often idiosyncratic material. When she and Swados finally went their separate ways, the actress should have been poised for a flurry of creative professional activity. Instead, the opposite happened.
"I had only worked with Liz," Kandel remembers, "so I never went through the regular channels that most actors go through. They get agents, they meet casting directors. I never had to do that, so when it came time to move on, there was nowhere to go.
"I also wasn’t happy acting. I was so knotted up, and I didn’t know how to become free. It didn’t feel good -- I didn’t get pleasure out of it. So I gave it up."
Eventually the theater beckoned once again. "It was Anne Bogart who brought me back," Kandel remembers. "She was doing an opera called
The Making of Americans. I hadn’t been on stage for about four years. My husband pushed me into it. We were living in Westchester, and Paul picked up the phone, dialed Anne’s number and put it to my ear."
For her audition two days later, Kandel arrived in new York, wild-eyed and terrified, prepared to sing two songs. "I’m not really a singer, even though I did Liz’s musicals. I got to the audition and I realized that I’d left the music in the car. So I had to sing a capella. I started one song too low and the other one too high. I was shaking, visibly shaking. When I finished, I was going to slink out of the audition. But Anne, who was sitting behind a table, got up, took my hand, shook it and said, ‘Karen, welcome back to the theater.’"
-- Stephen Nunns, American Theatre
"Does it have something to do with what it's like to be alive today?" Gordon Edelstein [artistic director of A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle, who has taken over the same post at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven] said [talking about how he chooses plays to produce]. "That is the litmus test for me." He said a season for New Haven, which he says has a New York City sensibility, would be different from those he put together in Seattle.
In Seattle, he said, "when the curtain rises on a play, the audience is open, but their tacit agreement is that life is pretty good, it's important to be comfortable, and that human beings actually can be healthy," Mr. Edelstein said.
"The curtain rises on a New York audience," he continued, "and everybody agrees we're basically sick and we want redemption and we want a good time but we're not made uncomfortable by deeply disturbing news about our psyches. In fact, that feels like the truth to us."
-- Robin Pogrebin, New York Times
Edie Falco and Stanley Tucci
in Frankie and Johnny in the Clare de Lune
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