Race Like You’re a Contestant on ‘Race to Bachelor Island’ to See the Hilarious ‘Tootsie’by Randi / July 2, 2019It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is the play Sweat by Lynn Nottage, currently playing at London’s Gielgud Theatre until July 20.
You know how society as we know it is falling apart and there’s nothing we can really do about it, so decent (and not so decent, but no one deserves the crumbling of the world) people are suffering in poverty and drug addiction and racism and sexism and classism and overall misery, and we need governments to work together for the people in order to solve any of these societal problems but the people running things are too busy thinking about their own comforts instead of caring about anyone else, let alone all of society, so things are just falling apart for the regular person and it’s all incredibly depressing? Yeah, well, so, Sweat.
Lynn Notage’s highly distressing, highly moving play about Reading, Pennsylvania and the devastation caused by joblessness (as well as the aforementioned –isms) is a hell of a depressing show. Nottage interviewed real citizens of Reading (not including Michael Scott) to research this show, since Reading has notably experienced a horrible decline in employment and 40% of the population now lives in poverty. I don’t know how many times I can say ‘depressing’ in one review but we will probably break that record today. Sweat shows us the lives of a small group of friends and acquaintances in Reading before and after all their lives changed for the worse.
This group consists of people who work at the big factory in town, people who used to work at the big factory in town, and their kids who have little choice but to also work at the big factory in town: Martha Plimpton’s volatile Tracy and her equally hot-tempered son Jason (stereotypical and scarily accurate central-PA white people who probably voted for the cheeto toilet); management-material Cynthia and her son Chris (black people who have to work harder to prove themselves), plus their estranged husband/father who is now an addict; their floaty old-hippie now-drunk friend Jessie; the bartender friend Stan; the bar’s Mexican busboy Oscar; and the good-intentioned parole officer. Yes, parole officer: the show begins with the kids, Jason and Chris, just released from prison. The rest of the show – before returning depressingly (there’s another!) to present day – shows us what led up to their arrest.
If this sounds compelling to you, well good, because we are all living in this world, and Sweat felt like a genuine reflection of the hardships of the working class, from the fear of how quickly joblessness can destroy your life, to America’s opioid epidemic, to how this fear to have someone real to blame for your lot in life can so easily lead to blaming those who are different from you. As someone who tries to focus on making her social justice efforts intersectional, I found a lot of this show a gut-punch of a reminder that some other people who we write off as not caring about people different from them simply don’t have the ability, the time, the luxury of caring about anything except working enough to make enough money to feed themselves to stay alive and then repeat the next day, and all their next days. It doesn’t make them good or bad people (well, some of them are bad people); it just makes for a world where caring for each other isn’t seen as a priority, and so we’re stuck in this vicious cycle of shit.
Nottage’s nuanced playwriting shines best as she develops these characters, along with a pretty remarkable cast. Plimpton was of course incredible, but she scared the absolute shit out of me. She was 100% exactly like some people I’ve met. She even looked exactly like a woman I used to work with: same exact fake blonde hair and gruff demeanor and ease of saying suuuper racist things. She was like half the women in Upper Darby who say “Wha, you think ya better than me?? YA THINK YA BETTER THAN ME?” and then knock over the bar table. That was Tracy, and her white supremacist son never had a chance with her antagonistic tendencies. (NB: Never get face tattoos, just don’t, you’ll never get a job et al., and ESPECIALLY don’t get white supremacist face tattoos. Or, ya know, do, so we know to stay away from you.) I found the whole cast moving and convincing in their individual ways. My favorite was honestly Leanne Best, who had little to do as Jessie but managed to turn her one big scene into the most heartbreaking part of a show that’s all hardship. When she reminisces about how she was supposed to see the world as a young adult but she started working at the factory and never could stop, she keeps repeating the list of destinations she and her boyfriend had memorized as a sort of mantra: “Istanbul, Tehran, Kandahar, Kabul” and so on. Her melancholy and regret at never having left Reading was palpable and tragic, and it was a tiny but wonderful performance.
But the plot teeters a bit, and it’s hard to provide a strong enough answer as to what we were actually supposed to take away from how depressing it all is. I wish, I honestly really wish, that the play had ended a scene early. Once we see all the pre-prison scenes (most of the action is the flashback), we meet again with the parole officer with Jason and Chris. He’s trying to inspire them and get them to really try with their new leases on life, and his scene ends with him talking to both men but speaking to the audience, and saying something super inspiring like “so what are you going to do to make it better? what are you going to do?” and then the theatre blacks out and I was like ‘HOLY SHIT I WANNA DO ALL THE GOOD THINGS! LET ME GO DO THEM!’ and I found it incredibly powerful. But then there was another scene! And, this final scene was clearly supposed to be super moving, but it actually wasn’t, and considering the content, it’s a shame that it just doesn’t work.
Overall, however, it’s a decent, poignant look at modern tragedy. There’s so much nuance about how ingrained racism, for one example, can be. I was blown away realizing how Tracy blames everything on her friend Cynthia’s inability as a low-level manager to stop some huge things from happening in the company, yet completely accepts her (white) bartender friend Stan’s reporting that his boss changed a rule at the bar. This kind of subtle creation of each realistic character makes Sweat a play to see, even if you won’t really learn anything except ‘fork, this is a ball of shit.’
INFORMATION
Sweat ends its short run (intentionally limited; only 50 performances at this theatre) on July 20, but it’s the kind of show that I am sure will be popping up all over the place with regional theatres, tours, everyone trying it on for size given how relevant it is.
If you can get there before July 20, the best seats (I’m SO happy I remembered for my own good!) at the Gielgud, if you pee in the ladies room and pee often, are front stalls, about Row D-K, because the door to the kind-of-hidden ladies (WHY DO THEY WANT TO KEEP THESE BATHROOMS A SECRET) is literally RIGHT THERE, if you are sitting on the aisle stage right (that’s HOUSE LEFT). I was sitting three feet from the door to the bathroom door! It was the best ever! I was so happy! (And then so quickly unhappy, obviously (did you READ the review??)) It was also really well air-conditioned on the hottest day in London so far this summer, so it was nice not to literally sweat.
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The Mastersingers of Nuremberg at the English National Opera: Richard Wagner was a Sumbitch
When the representative for the English National Opera took to the stage at 3pm on a recent Saturday and announced that one of the principal actors had a gastrointestinal infection, but would still be performing, and they were just asking for our understanding, well then you knew you were in for a treat of a day. When a prim and proper British woman who works in opera informs you just for the sake of informing you that an opera singer about to sing in front of you might crap his pants onstage, that’s worth the ticket price alone.
And when the people seated next to me were talking about the run time a few minutes before curtain, and one turned to me and asked, “Wait, is this really close to 4 hours?”, and I said “Actually it’s more like 5,” and then I was corrected that it was closer to 6 (with intermissions), well you knew the whole thing would be quite special.
And when the people seated next to me were talking about the run time a few minutes before curtain, and one turned to me and asked, “Wait, is this really close to 4 hours?”, and I said “Actually it’s more like 5,” and then I was corrected that it was closer to 6 (with intermissions), well you knew the whole thing would be quite special.
“The Mastersingers of Nuremberg” is one of Wagner’s supposed masterpieces, not that I think this anti-Semitic assrat really should be considered the creator of masterpieces. Regardless, I went to see for myself, and by god, it was sung in English instead of German. I mean. People. Do the operas in the language in which they were written. I don’t watch the dubbed over version of “Life is Beautiful” and I sure as hell don’t want to hear terribly translated lyrics plunked onto melodies they weren’t meant for. A few years ago, in Vienna, we saw “Rigoletto”, one of Verdi’s masterpieces (actual), and the bastards did it in German. It was HIDEO. I swore I’d only see operas performed in their original languages after that. But I got free tickets to “Mastersingers” and so whatever. It was worth it so I could see in the flesh how bonkers Wagner was. Did he have syphilis? That’s always the cause of ancient times people being craybies.
So “Mastersingers” is an opera in three acts, each one the length of a decent movie, or a regular opera. The show begins in a church with like 100 people who you never see again singing hymns. At the end of the church service, a knight just passing through sees this young girl Eva and falls in love with her (naturally) and she falls in love with him (naturally) and then he approaches her and says hello and what not. Her maid informs the knight that no, the girl isn’t yet engaged, but she’s about to be, because her father is the leader of the Mastersingers guild and has promised his daughter as the prize in the upcoming singing competition. What a cool dad! So the knight, Walther, you’re probably not supposed to pronounce the ‘h’ but I do, has the great idea to audition for the Mastersingers, be invited to join the guild, and then win the competition and be able to marry this young girl he just fell in love with when he saw her from across the room even though her dress is hideous and she wears it the entire show.
Walther goes to the guild meeting, where Eva’s father sings about how great their guild is and how pretty their costumes are. Before he enters, David (Han Sachs’s apprentice (Hans Sachs is the lead role but like is no one important??)) teaches Walther how to sing like a master. In a very confusing lecture, David apparently says that there must be birds, and flowers, but not trees, or some such absolute hilarious nonsense that no one would understand. Walther still tries to audition, with a song about love of course because he’s an expert in that biz now, but is laughed at because he doesn’t know how they do. The town clerk, Beckmesser, is a guild member who reeeeally wants to win the marriage prize and he is really mad that they let Walther audition at all. He makes fun of him a lot. He also is clearly Wagner’s Jewish character, as he’s rich and greedy and cheap and the villain and Wagner wants everyone to hate him, just like he wanted everyone to hate Jews. Wagner’s the worst. Beckmesser is like who let this amateur into our club? And Hans Sachs is like hey be nice, why can’t we give this guy a chance? And Beckmesser’s all “Shut up Hans Sachs and go finish making my shoes dammit why you taking so long to make my shoes?” Hans Sachs is a shoemaker p.s.
First intermission. We moved down to better seats. Then we made friends with old people and tried to identify all the famous German notables on the curtain. Oh yeah, the show curtain was a freaking mass of maybe 200 scary white faces, all famous Germans, including Goethe, Marlena Dietrich, prob lots of Nazis.
The beginning of Act Two is probably my favorite part. We open in the alley between Hans Sachs’s shop/house and Eva’s father’s house. David is informing Eva’s maid Magdalena, who is also David’s secretish lover, that Walther failed his Mastersinger audition. Magdalena becomes so upset for Eva’s future that she forgets to give David the food she brought for him, and then everyone in the vicinity makes fun of him before Hans Sachs saves him and ushers him back to the shop. Let’s go over that. The most terribly sad thing Wagner could think of having the maid do in her sadness was to forget to feed her boyfriend. And then the whole town mocks him because he didn’t get food gifts from his girlfriend that night. I’m obsessed.
Then we see Eva and her father talk about the audition. Her father expresses a little bit of doubt about hosting a singing competition as the means of finding his daughter’s husband. Good thinking, man. He gets over his 2-minute span of doubt right quick though and is all “nahhh whatevs this plan is great, not weird, totally normal for this time period.” He goes to sleep while Eva talks to Hans Sachs about Walther. Hans is like ugh he totally messed up even though we tried to teach him, so you’re probably gonna marry Beckmesser, sorry. And Eva’s like oh god dammit Hans, can’t you at least enter the competition? I’d be okay with marrying you. I mean, I love that new guy, what’s his name, Walther, but I’d be happy with you. Hans is like bitch you tripping.
Then Walther, who, remember, is a knight, and probably left a much cooler life wherever he came from, comes by in the middle of the knight and talks to Eva. They’re wondering whether they should elope but then Beckmesser that awful Jew (Wagner’s words) comes by to serenade his future bride. Since Eva is outside cavorting with Walther, her wonderful maid Magdalena pretends to be Eva at her bedroom window. So Beckmesser is singing to Magdalena, thinking it’s Eva, and Hans Sachs is sitting on his front stoop cobbling Beckmesser’s shoes. It’s all a big jumble of activity in the middle of the night because these people have no regard for their neighbors who are TRYING TO SLEEP DAMMIT. Beckmesser’s singing, Eva and Walther are trying to be quiet in the shadows, Hans Sachs is cobbling and hammering, and then David comes out of Hans Sachs’s house (they live together?) and sees Beckmesser serenading his girlfriend and so he attacks him. David and Beckmesser start fighting and then THE ENTIRE TOWN JOINS IN THE FIGHT. And then everyone is like left in their underwear! And all those people from the very first scene about 4 hours ago are finally given another part in the show and beat up the guys! And then Hans Sachs sends Eva home so she doesn’t elope and the riot sort of stops! And then! Omg and then! This awful scary figure in black holding a lantern comes out of the shadows singing a dirge-like tune – it’s the Night Watchman, and he’s dressed in Angie’s Maleficent costume, headgear and all. It is REDONK. End Act Two.
Intermission Number Two. We go outside and get dinner and ice cream. I am surprised at the number of people out on the streets still and then I realize it’s not even 7pm.
Act Three. There are noticeably fewer people in the theatre. This is a marathon, people. Commitment is half the battle. So we open in Hans Sachs’s shop and he is reading. I remember being bored. The guy playing Hans Sachs is a really good singer though. His name is Iain Paterson. Walther appears and Hans Sachs tries again to teach him how to sing in the Mastersingers style. This time is more successful, and Walther composes a pretty beautiful song. For the first time all day, I thought, oh wow, that’s lovely, I don’t feel like I am being bombarded by the noise of clanging pots, Richard.
This is where things got confusing. Walther leaves to get dressed for the festival, and Beckmesser arrives, still torn up and hurt from his beating the night before. Like, FFS Wagner, this guy really didn’t do anything. He’s mean and annoying but Wagner clearly wants the audience to delight in his misfortune and pain here because he’s so goddamn anti-Semitic. What an asstard. Beckmesser sees the new song on Hans’s desk, and it’s in Hans’s handwriting because he transcribed it while Walther was singing and composing it. But Beckmesser sees that it’s in Hans’s writing, Hans doesn’t correct him, and Beckmesser gets mad assuming that Hans is entering the competition. This is a big problem for Beck because the great Hans Sachs is the best singer or something and is serious competition. Beckmesser’s all “Aw come on Hans you’re breaking my barrrrs!” So Hans gives Beckmesser the song that Walther just wrote. He just gives it to him. And he warns him that it’s hard to sing so he better be careful. Like that’s Hans’s plan, to have Beckmesser sing Walther’s great song but not practice it enough so he ends up messing up and embarrassing himself. Whaaat a plan.
Then Eva arrives and weirdly so weirdly flirts with Hans. She clearly came looking for Walther, and when she didn’t see him, thought the next best idea was to trick Hans into thinking she came looking for him. She dumb. But then Walther comes downstairs and she like cries out in joy and Hans is like see, you love him, and she is like yeah sorry I played with your heart I got lost in the game oh baby baby. Then David and Magdalena appear, and Hans Sachs promotes David from apprentice to whatever is above that, and also is like hey you two should get married, you have my blessing, which apparently was necessary for a man’s sort-of boss to give back then even though both men are clearly over 50 years old. And then the only fantastic part of the entire thing occurs: All five of these characters sing a beautiful quintet with little to no accompaniment, and the opera should have ended there. It was gorgeous. During the applause after this movement, I actually started gathering my things because I thought it was the end. It should have been. But then there was another hour and a half.
But of course it couldn’t be over – we have to see the festival in its entirety! First, all the guilds in Nuremberg show off their skills and wares. It’s the most random procession. We see different art works on display, and like metalworks I think, and then all of a sudden there are five gigantic soft pretzels on display for judging and one gets a blue ribbon. WHAT IS THIS SHOW. I really wanted a pretzel.
Then the Mastersingers have their competition in front of the entire town. Beckmesser sings the song he got from Hans, but he didn’t practice and has no idea how it’s supposed to go so it’s a huge mess of a thing and it’s really awkward and everyone has fremdschamen which they actually know they have because it’s their word, the Germans.
Beckmesser tells everyone that he didn’t write this crap, that Hans Sachs did. Everyone gasps, they all actually gasp, because erma p, how could the great Hans Sachs’s have written this terrible song? Hans is like, people please, A) I didn’t write it, and B) it’s actually a good song so why not let the guy who wrote it sing it how it’s supposed to be sung? And then Walther sings and everyone realizes he should be a Master and so they make him one and announce him the winner of the competition/young girl and Eva is so happy that she can marry the guy she fell in love with yesterday.
BUT THEN, Walther steps back with Hans Sachs and is like…um…Hans…I changed my mind! I don’t want to be a Master NOR do I want to marry this rando! And Hans, oh my god, Hans gives a speech that actually had me rolling in my seat laughing, not believing what was happening in front of me. Hans Sachs, in an effort to convince Walther to accept his prize (a wife) and to become a member of the Masters guild, sings a prolonged speech about how important it is to be German, to continue German art, and how even art like Walther’s that is different and challenging still has to be performed within the existing culture and framework in order to, well, exist, and that he and everyone and all of Germany need “Germany” like their current system/government in order to make their art, be happy, and live good lives. In order to respect Germany and all the good things Germany has done, Walther needs to marry this girl. And then, just when you think this suddenly North Korean ending can’t get weirder, THE WHOLE CAST PULLS OUT LIFE SIZE CARDBOARD CUTOUTS OF THE FAMOUS GERMANS THAT WERE PICTURED ON THE SHOW CURTAIN, LIKE FROM BEHIND THE ACTORS COME HUGE STANDEES OF GOETHE AND VARIOUS GRIMMS AND OTTO VON BISMARCK AND WHO THE HELL KNOWS AND THAT’S HOW THIS SHOW ENDED AND OH MY GOD IT WAS THE CRAZIEST THING EVER.
There’s one more performance, Tuesday March 10. If you have seven free hours, you should go. Or just catch the ending. Worth it.
“The Twilight Zone” at London’s Almeida Theatre: Creepy Humans Are Creepy (and…Moving?)
It’s Theatre Thursday y’all! Today we are talking about “The Twilight Zone” at London’s Almeida Theatre, which is playing until January 27.
I cannot do scary stuff. I don’t mean horror movies; that’s a whole other level of scary that isn’t even on my radar. I mean like, anything dark or kind of about death. The Good Place is an exception because it’s the best show ever and you kind of forget they’re dead because they do such normal things and have such normal lives, kind of. Normal not-lives, I guess. But I hate Halloween, mostly because there are skeletons around. That’s the kind of thing I mean. I’m currently writing this from Paris and I don’t know what to do tomorrow because I think I’ve gone to every tourist attraction in the city – except the Catacombs, because no way jose! It’s Halloweeny down there. So what I’m saying is, I wouldn’t necessarily be the first person to go to a theatrical adaptation of The Twilight Zone, because scary and dark and not full of rainbows. But the operative word in there is theatrical, and so I had to. And guess what – while it wasn’t great, parts of it were very good and I enjoyed it a lot despite the skirr.
I cannot do scary stuff. I don’t mean horror movies; that’s a whole other level of scary that isn’t even on my radar. I mean like, anything dark or kind of about death. The Good Place is an exception because it’s the best show ever and you kind of forget they’re dead because they do such normal things and have such normal lives, kind of. Normal not-lives, I guess. But I hate Halloween, mostly because there are skeletons around. That’s the kind of thing I mean. I’m currently writing this from Paris and I don’t know what to do tomorrow because I think I’ve gone to every tourist attraction in the city – except the Catacombs, because no way jose! It’s Halloweeny down there. So what I’m saying is, I wouldn’t necessarily be the first person to go to a theatrical adaptation of The Twilight Zone, because scary and dark and not full of rainbows. But the operative word in there is theatrical, and so I had to. And guess what – while it wasn’t great, parts of it were very good and I enjoyed it a lot despite the skirr.
The Twilight Zone currently at the Almeida Theatre (right across from an Ottolenghi! Have a pure happy veggie meal before questioning the universe) was adapted from the Rod Serling (I keep wanting to say Sterling) television series by playwright Anne Washburn, who did a very interesting take on an apocalyptic future Mr Burns story a few years ago that my husband loved. I didn’t get to see that, so i was excited to see what she did here. I think her hands were a little tied creatively because, due to using famous specific episodes, there was only so much she could add or change. What we get is pretty straightforward episode play, and even though I don’t remember ever watching the TV show, I guess I did because I remembered some storylines.
Because Anne didn’t have much to do or add, I imagine that her creative juices were stymied and she wanted to let them flow or at least put some sort of stamp on the show. And unfortunately, that led to the worst part of the show: There are too many long, unnecessary monologues that ruin the pace and honestly caused me to roll my eyes a lot, which I hate doing because i have dry eyes. These vignettes, no matter how brief, stand on their own and often resonate with the human condition; that’s why they’ve persisted in the culture. You don’t need to present the story and then have someone drone on for five minutes about how that did indeed reflect the human condition and the universe is so unknown and peculiar and wow isn’t this all interesting. Kind of ruins it.
But really that’s the only purely negative thing I can point to. This adaptation is a very decent time in the theatre, and very funny at times as well. In fact, in the beginning, I thought it was going to be a kind of tongue-in-cheek sarcastic presentation of the Twilight Zone, maybe poking fun at it, because there was so much of that kind of humour. It starts with the sketch (is TTZ a sketch show?), one of the few I remembered, where a bus stops in a diner where there are rumours of an alien being among the small crowd, and they can’t find out which one it is and they’re scared they’re all in danger. I really enjoyed this opener mostly because at one point, they all hide under the bar, and then when they got back up, I could have sworn that there was an actor among them who was not there before, like that the alien wasn’t even one of the original crowd but just now snuck his way in and I was like dammmmn they aren’t even calling attention to that that was just so subtle and brilliant! But, my husband didn’t notice any of that, so maybe i just miscounted. i like to think that the direction was that subtly detailed though so I’m gonna stick with my account. Anyway, one of the actresses, Adrianna Bertola, is very short, like shorter than my mom and Kristin Chenoweth um opposite of combined, and so she played all children characters and it was kind of hilarious! And everyone EVERYONE kept unwittingly pulling cigarettes out of their pockets or sleeves, and then once noticing, saying ‘I don’t smoke…’ So I thought it was going to be that kind of show, and I think it would have been a little better if it was indeed all hilarious mockery of the form.
But it wasn’t, and most of the rest of it was quite serious. Sure there was the very brief ballet-of-subjectivity when a society of disgusting faced monsters unwraps a surgery patient’s head to find that she is HORRIFICALLY DISFIGURED i.e. without one of those masks and just her plain human-faced self. So that was funny. But that came sandwiched in between much more troubling and dire skits (is it a skit show) like the one about a woman, played very effectively by Amy Griffiths, who meets a strange young child (again the short adult) who warns her about a strange man that she sort of remembers, only for the woman to realise a bit too late that the man is a murderer from her past and the child was her young self. SO CREEPY. And the one where a couple hears their daughter yelling for them but she isn’t in her bed, she’s been sucked into some kind of Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar time void in another dimension and it’s really sad because the dog gets into the warp zone too (but they make it out thank dog). There were so many creepy ones like that, including one that i didn’t like because it made me so uncomfortable: It featured John Marquez (related to Mimi?) as a man who was terrified of going to sleep because he was tortured in his sleep in a circus-like setting (i mean that’s torture anytime) and a tantalising woman (Lizzy Connelly) who lures him, I don’t know, further into sleep? trying to kill him? and she has scary gray and white hair and leads the ensemble in this INCREDIBLY weird masked dance (I hate masks so scary) which was straight out of that weird play Bette Midler’s character was in in Beaches, her show-within-the-show that wasn’t about Otto Titsling. So yeah, a creepy masked dance is bad enough for me but to make it a story about how sleep is a bad thing you need to avoid or else you die??? Literally the meanest story you could tell me. My husband, on the other hand, thought this was great, and especially enjoyed the weird ass dance so take that for what it’s worth.
A great creepy ass ‘episode’ featured here – and told quite effectively in a broken up manner, as many of the stories were interspersed among each other, weaving in and out – told of three military heroes who keep disappearing, not only from space but from collective memory, one by one. As one would leave, the remaining would ask a third party what happened to x, and the third party would be like x, who’s that? And the remaining would be like ‘you know the guy in this front-page newspaper story with the picture of the three of us’ and throughout the telling the newspaper photo would change from three people to two people to one. It was so well done; i didn’t even notice them grabbing different papers, but it was incredibly effective. And kind of funny too, at times, if you think of it as a comedy instead of focusing on how the idea of it is horrifying.
The stories that stuck with me the most, however, were the ones that seemed most human and most realistic, with no aliens and little sci-fi as you’d stereotypically think of it. Whereas before seeing this show I would have guessed that TTZ was most in its element with those kinds of alien-y or weird-metaphysical-phenomena stories, after seeing this i understand that the genius of it comes in these more realistic, normal-human stories that ask very unnerving questions about the plain human condition that we all experience. For example, one that I keep thinking about is a take on a theme that we’ve seen repeatedly in many different art forms, but it doesn’t make it any less upsetting. In this one, an astronaut is going to be sent on a mission that will take at least 50 years, but he will spend most of it on his ship in a cryo-chamber so he won’t age. Unforch, he falls in love right before his mission, with a woman (a great Franc Ashman) who would be left on earth to age naturally, and so when he leaves, they are saying goodbye to their relationship for good. Then 50 years pass and the astronaut has returned to earth. yippee! But oh no: Of course, humans being terrible at communicating but wanting to make nice gestures, the woman decided to cryo-freeze herself the entire time so that when her man returned, they would be the same age. But of course, humans and so on, the man decided NOT to take his cold nap in his ship and instead spent the 50 years ageing as normal. Ughhhh you guysss! It’s so sad right! Kind of like a Magi twist kind of thing but sooooo much worse i mean homegirl’s hair would grow back but you can’t un-age! FFS i’m still kind of really mad about this one and it’s not real. Just so sad to think about! Remind me that it’s not real!
The other one that made the biggest impact and I thought was impeccably done was a sketch about racism in America. In this story, it was the height of nuclear-war fears (now?) and, so sad, a bomb was coming right to the heart of America. A neighbourhood of families dealt with the news and their decisions in a tense situation that made all kinds of brutal thoughts come out among them. Only one of the families has a bomb shelter, and the rest fight about who should get to join them in their tiny hole. They start understandably enough, a young white couple arguing that they should get to go because they have a baby, things like that. But as time to fight for survival runs out, they lose all restraint and the gloves come off and they resort to all kinds of race-based arguments. “My people were here first” vs. “Well my people literally built everything you see around you.” “You can’t love this country like I do because you weren’t born here” vs. “Well I actually had to take a test to become a citizen, you were just an accident of birth.” Things like that. I was riveted, honestly, and so impressed by how much it really reflected the innerbelly of racist America. I particularly loved when the white woman so perfectly yelled about how the minorities in the room, especially the black couple, didn’t deserve to be the ones to survive because they hadn’t been there as long and they don’t love America like the whites do and yada yada bullshit like that, which she immediately followed with “Now I don’t have a racist bone in my body…” and I GUFFAWED because it was just too too perfect. Oh white American women we have SO MUCH work to do. This scene was just too accurate with the things that come out when you think you have nothing and everything left to lose, and too spot-on with how the various groups in America think and talk. And on top of all that, it portrayed really realistic survival instincts and things that people would very believably resort to if this kind of event arose, which I really really hope it never does.
So The Twilight Zone, made theatrical, had some very poignant and provocative moments. Some of them worked very well in the theatre, but some I couldn’t help but think probably gained nothing from the transfer off the small screen. The racism scene worked well because it was so theatrical, but others clearly would have been equally or more effective on TV. I wonder what the selection process for the adaptation involved. It’s always hard to compare adaptations of the same work across different platforms, and for something so famous and well-known, this translation, while not great, is solid and pretty entertaining, even if it has too many scary masks (and those cringey monologues) for my taste.
INFORMATION
The Almeida is a cool spot in Islington, so far from the normal theatre district, which is nice. However, it is a very cramped lobby, and they don’t open the auditorium up for way too long so everyone is kind of squeezed in vying for standing space, which is ludicrous. They need to just open the doors earlier. Also, tickets are a little expensive for it being essentially an experimental hip downtown-style theatre joint (except uptown, but I’m using NYC speak).
Because Anne didn’t have much to do or add, I imagine that her creative juices were stymied and she wanted to let them flow or at least put some sort of stamp on the show. And unfortunately, that led to the worst part of the show: There are too many long, unnecessary monologues that ruin the pace and honestly caused me to roll my eyes a lot, which I hate doing because i have dry eyes. These vignettes, no matter how brief, stand on their own and often resonate with the human condition; that’s why they’ve persisted in the culture. You don’t need to present the story and then have someone drone on for five minutes about how that did indeed reflect the human condition and the universe is so unknown and peculiar and wow isn’t this all interesting. Kind of ruins it.
But really that’s the only purely negative thing I can point to. This adaptation is a very decent time in the theatre, and very funny at times as well. In fact, in the beginning, I thought it was going to be a kind of tongue-in-cheek sarcastic presentation of the Twilight Zone, maybe poking fun at it, because there was so much of that kind of humour. It starts with the sketch (is TTZ a sketch show?), one of the few I remembered, where a bus stops in a diner where there are rumours of an alien being among the small crowd, and they can’t find out which one it is and they’re scared they’re all in danger. I really enjoyed this opener mostly because at one point, they all hide under the bar, and then when they got back up, I could have sworn that there was an actor among them who was not there before, like that the alien wasn’t even one of the original crowd but just now snuck his way in and I was like dammmmn they aren’t even calling attention to that that was just so subtle and brilliant! But, my husband didn’t notice any of that, so maybe i just miscounted. i like to think that the direction was that subtly detailed though so I’m gonna stick with my account. Anyway, one of the actresses, Adrianna Bertola, is very short, like shorter than my mom and Kristin Chenoweth um opposite of combined, and so she played all children characters and it was kind of hilarious! And everyone EVERYONE kept unwittingly pulling cigarettes out of their pockets or sleeves, and then once noticing, saying ‘I don’t smoke…’ So I thought it was going to be that kind of show, and I think it would have been a little better if it was indeed all hilarious mockery of the form.
But it wasn’t, and most of the rest of it was quite serious. Sure there was the very brief ballet-of-subjectivity when a society of disgusting faced monsters unwraps a surgery patient’s head to find that she is HORRIFICALLY DISFIGURED i.e. without one of those masks and just her plain human-faced self. So that was funny. But that came sandwiched in between much more troubling and dire skits (is it a skit show) like the one about a woman, played very effectively by Amy Griffiths, who meets a strange young child (again the short adult) who warns her about a strange man that she sort of remembers, only for the woman to realise a bit too late that the man is a murderer from her past and the child was her young self. SO CREEPY. And the one where a couple hears their daughter yelling for them but she isn’t in her bed, she’s been sucked into some kind of Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar time void in another dimension and it’s really sad because the dog gets into the warp zone too (but they make it out thank dog). There were so many creepy ones like that, including one that i didn’t like because it made me so uncomfortable: It featured John Marquez (related to Mimi?) as a man who was terrified of going to sleep because he was tortured in his sleep in a circus-like setting (i mean that’s torture anytime) and a tantalising woman (Lizzy Connelly) who lures him, I don’t know, further into sleep? trying to kill him? and she has scary gray and white hair and leads the ensemble in this INCREDIBLY weird masked dance (I hate masks so scary) which was straight out of that weird play Bette Midler’s character was in in Beaches, her show-within-the-show that wasn’t about Otto Titsling. So yeah, a creepy masked dance is bad enough for me but to make it a story about how sleep is a bad thing you need to avoid or else you die??? Literally the meanest story you could tell me. My husband, on the other hand, thought this was great, and especially enjoyed the weird ass dance so take that for what it’s worth.
A great creepy ass ‘episode’ featured here – and told quite effectively in a broken up manner, as many of the stories were interspersed among each other, weaving in and out – told of three military heroes who keep disappearing, not only from space but from collective memory, one by one. As one would leave, the remaining would ask a third party what happened to x, and the third party would be like x, who’s that? And the remaining would be like ‘you know the guy in this front-page newspaper story with the picture of the three of us’ and throughout the telling the newspaper photo would change from three people to two people to one. It was so well done; i didn’t even notice them grabbing different papers, but it was incredibly effective. And kind of funny too, at times, if you think of it as a comedy instead of focusing on how the idea of it is horrifying.
The stories that stuck with me the most, however, were the ones that seemed most human and most realistic, with no aliens and little sci-fi as you’d stereotypically think of it. Whereas before seeing this show I would have guessed that TTZ was most in its element with those kinds of alien-y or weird-metaphysical-phenomena stories, after seeing this i understand that the genius of it comes in these more realistic, normal-human stories that ask very unnerving questions about the plain human condition that we all experience. For example, one that I keep thinking about is a take on a theme that we’ve seen repeatedly in many different art forms, but it doesn’t make it any less upsetting. In this one, an astronaut is going to be sent on a mission that will take at least 50 years, but he will spend most of it on his ship in a cryo-chamber so he won’t age. Unforch, he falls in love right before his mission, with a woman (a great Franc Ashman) who would be left on earth to age naturally, and so when he leaves, they are saying goodbye to their relationship for good. Then 50 years pass and the astronaut has returned to earth. yippee! But oh no: Of course, humans being terrible at communicating but wanting to make nice gestures, the woman decided to cryo-freeze herself the entire time so that when her man returned, they would be the same age. But of course, humans and so on, the man decided NOT to take his cold nap in his ship and instead spent the 50 years ageing as normal. Ughhhh you guysss! It’s so sad right! Kind of like a Magi twist kind of thing but sooooo much worse i mean homegirl’s hair would grow back but you can’t un-age! FFS i’m still kind of really mad about this one and it’s not real. Just so sad to think about! Remind me that it’s not real!
The other one that made the biggest impact and I thought was impeccably done was a sketch about racism in America. In this story, it was the height of nuclear-war fears (now?) and, so sad, a bomb was coming right to the heart of America. A neighbourhood of families dealt with the news and their decisions in a tense situation that made all kinds of brutal thoughts come out among them. Only one of the families has a bomb shelter, and the rest fight about who should get to join them in their tiny hole. They start understandably enough, a young white couple arguing that they should get to go because they have a baby, things like that. But as time to fight for survival runs out, they lose all restraint and the gloves come off and they resort to all kinds of race-based arguments. “My people were here first” vs. “Well my people literally built everything you see around you.” “You can’t love this country like I do because you weren’t born here” vs. “Well I actually had to take a test to become a citizen, you were just an accident of birth.” Things like that. I was riveted, honestly, and so impressed by how much it really reflected the innerbelly of racist America. I particularly loved when the white woman so perfectly yelled about how the minorities in the room, especially the black couple, didn’t deserve to be the ones to survive because they hadn’t been there as long and they don’t love America like the whites do and yada yada bullshit like that, which she immediately followed with “Now I don’t have a racist bone in my body…” and I GUFFAWED because it was just too too perfect. Oh white American women we have SO MUCH work to do. This scene was just too accurate with the things that come out when you think you have nothing and everything left to lose, and too spot-on with how the various groups in America think and talk. And on top of all that, it portrayed really realistic survival instincts and things that people would very believably resort to if this kind of event arose, which I really really hope it never does.
So The Twilight Zone, made theatrical, had some very poignant and provocative moments. Some of them worked very well in the theatre, but some I couldn’t help but think probably gained nothing from the transfer off the small screen. The racism scene worked well because it was so theatrical, but others clearly would have been equally or more effective on TV. I wonder what the selection process for the adaptation involved. It’s always hard to compare adaptations of the same work across different platforms, and for something so famous and well-known, this translation, while not great, is solid and pretty entertaining, even if it has too many scary masks (and those cringey monologues) for my taste.
INFORMATION
The Almeida is a cool spot in Islington, so far from the normal theatre district, which is nice. However, it is a very cramped lobby, and they don’t open the auditorium up for way too long so everyone is kind of squeezed in vying for standing space, which is ludicrous. They need to just open the doors earlier. Also, tickets are a little expensive for it being essentially an experimental hip downtown-style theatre joint (except uptown, but I’m using NYC speak).
OH OH this will have nothing to do with your experience, but I must share: The man sitting two seats away from me (I was next to his wife) PEELED AND ATE AN ORANGE DURING THE SHOW. WHO DOES THAT. WHOOOO DOES THAT. It was the strongest smelling orange ever and even though I like oranges I got nauseous. WHO DOES THAT OMG CAN PEOPLE PLEASE TRY TO BEHAVE BETTER IN THE THEATRE FFS?
