“Home, I’m Darling”: Hey Mama Welcome to the ‘50s, oh oh oh oh oh ohby Randi / September 6, 2018
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about “The Humans”, which is at London’s Hampstead Theatre until October 13.
As summer plays close and the new season slowly gets into gear, London’s drama scene got a much needed infusion of American greatness with the Broadway transfer of “The Humans”. Stephen Karam’s 2015 work about an ordinary American family and the hardships they face individually and together comes to London’s Hampstead Theatre with its Broadway cast intact, along with my favorite Broadway director-that-I-once-saw-give-one-of-the-best-acting-performances-ever-in-The-Normal-Heart-but-that’s-neither-here-nor-there, Joe Mantello, still at the helm. Winner of the 2016 Tony Award for Best Play, “The Humans” seems like the basic story of a typical family at first, but its brilliance lies in nuance and individual interpretation that will have you contemplating it endlessly.
As summer plays close and the new season slowly gets into gear, London’s drama scene got a much needed infusion of American greatness with the Broadway transfer of “The Humans”. Stephen Karam’s 2015 work about an ordinary American family and the hardships they face individually and together comes to London’s Hampstead Theatre with its Broadway cast intact, along with my favorite Broadway director-that-I-once-saw-give-one-of-the-best-acting-performances-ever-in-The-Normal-Heart-but-that’s-neither-here-nor-there, Joe Mantello, still at the helm. Winner of the 2016 Tony Award for Best Play, “The Humans” seems like the basic story of a typical family at first, but its brilliance lies in nuance and individual interpretation that will have you contemplating it endlessly.
If you are in London and might be seeing it before it closes next month, bookmark this page and read it post-show because there’s gonna be hella spoilers coming.
The play tells the story of the Blake family, from Scranton, Pa., coming together to celebrate Thanksgiving amid a snowstorm at their daughter Brigid’s new Chinatown NYC hovel. You have the father Erik (Reed Birney, who we had just seen days before in his episodes of ‘The Americans’, which we’ve now finished and can’t stop talking about so hit me up if you want in on our support group), the mother Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell, always a goddamn pleasure), the grandmother Momo (Lauren Klein, who does so much with so little), the adult daughters Aimee (Cassie Beck, so perfectly capturing every nice but kind of depressed girl I know) and Brigid (Sarah Steele, so perfectly capturing every self-involved and jappy as hell non-jew I’ve ever known), and Brigid’s boyfriend Richard (Arian Moayad, trying to keep the peace between a family he’s just meeting and sooo nailing that awkward ass-kissing that you have to do while trying to keep conversation smooth).
Brigid and Richard have just moved into this dumpy basement apartment which yes has two levels which is great in a city like New York, but it also has no windows except the one with bars over it that opens onto the smoky alleyway so already it is my nightmare apartment. To make me even more anxious about their living situation, their upstairs neighbor is straight out of those “funny” Upstairs Neighbors videos that imagine them as actively trying to make as much noise as possible, doing things like rolling bowling balls around and moving furniture in the middle of the night. IT’S TRUE WHY ARE THEY ALL SO FORKING LOUD. And they all stomp. Anyway, every once in a while Brigid and Richard’s new neighbor will create some crazy loud BANG. They’re okay with it, trying to make the best of the situation, but Erik is shaken to his core with every sporadic bang or crash from upstairs.
As we meet the family, we quickly learn all their shortcomings and issues through effective and efficient dialogue. Brigid, self-involved as she is, has forgotten to tell her parents about the two-story situation, which, given that Momo is in a wheelchair (and suffering from late-stage dementia), is quite the oversight. God she was S0 many people I know. Aimee, meanwhile, is falling apart at the seams, having just gotten dumped by her long-term partner and dealing with really horrible ulcerative colitis. Her ‘win-sided phin call’, as Gil Faizon and George St. Geegland would call it, to her ex-girlfriend is heart-breaking, as is the reaction of her father, secretly within earshot, who couldn’t do anything to help his daughter. Letting intimate moments like this breathe is what makes this play’s version of this family so special.
Although Jayne Houdyshell is the epitome of warmth, the girls tend to be harder on their mother than they are on their father, who they dote on. They love everything about Erik, but they constantly make fun of Deirdre, from her ridiculous emails to her charity work to her dedication to religion. It seems a little harmless and a little unfair at the same time, although it provides for a lot of great comedy that rings so true to everyone’s family. Like how Deirdre sends Aimee every single tragic LGBT news story simply because she is a lesbian, and so Brigid tells her mom, “You don’t have to text her every time a lesbian kills herself!” They also make fun of her forwarded emails, the kind with 12 different kinds of font used, which we all know so well. Deirdre gives it back though, like telling off the depressed Aimee, when she brings up her interest in superfoods, “If you’re so miserable why are you trying to live forever?” Loves it. The way they paint these characters with such an accurate, familiar brush is genius, letting us immediately identify with so many aspects so that we are invested in their problems.
And the problems become apparent. There are the obvious sort like Brigid’s subpar home, Aimee’s mental and physical health, Momo’s dementia. Then there’s the fact that both daughters are failing professionally, through no real fault of their own, in a harsh specific economy and a hard general world. Like every struggling middle class family, the parents are having trouble at work too, with Deirdre getting passed over for promotions simply due to her age (and probably gender), while Erik’s failings are the only ones attached to actual responsibility. When the demons haunting him come out to the family, it’s shocking, since we’ve seen him as the stalwart, upstanding member of this clan that the girls idolize. That he alone is responsible for hurting his family and their future the way he has changes the easygoing dynamic and leaves everyone unsure of how to proceed in their usual way.
And, as the night progresses, Erik’s reaction to the noise gets more extreme, as does his seeming skittishness about everything, from lights going out to pans falling off tables. This is where the play is not just a family drama but is also kind of a thriller. Erik’s terror at things going bump in the night, and the unexplained reasons for them, make it seem like at any moment an alien predator will pop out and attack, and often had me holding my breath. And it’s why a lot of people think that he dies at the end, when he goes through the hallway that resembles a tunnel of the only visible light. But while I’m not going to tell anyone their interpretation of plays is wrong, I didn’t think he died. I think that his terror and his reactions to the supernatural-seeming elements were there to show that none of that is as scary as facing your own problems, the messes you’ve created in reality. The scary neighbor who freaked him out was just doing laundry, proving that the things that can terrify you in the dark are nothing compared to dealing with your reality when things you’ve done wrong come to light. What he did and what he has to contend with now are much scarier that whatever could have caused those bangs or crashes in the apartment, and that’s the realization that elevates this work from a typical but great family drama to a provocative, intriguing masterpiece.
INFORMATION
“The Humans” is playing at London’s Hampstead Theatre until October 13. It is a 90 minute one act.
STAGE DOOR
The Hampstead’s stage door situation is more like a ‘everyone convene in the lobby!’ situation. The cast is very friendly although I was too embarrassed to talk to everyone or ask for pictures because I’m a weirdo.
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“Oppenheimer”: Decent But Unedited New London Play
The story of the American scientist who created the atomic bomb sounds like it could be either interesting or boring. The new London show achieves both. The first act is well done and pretty compelling, but the second act had seven end points and needs hella cutting. Still, it’s an interesting story that’s worth seeing – especially if they fix it before the next production.
We begin in Oppy’s (as his “friends” call him) house as his (repeatedly described non-monogamous) girlfriend hosts a drunken neurotic fundraiser for ‘the Spanish crisis’ in the early stages of World War II. Her agitated uneasy speeches show us 1) they’re all proud Communists and b) she, Jean, is quite mentally unstable. I wouldn’t want to be friends with these people. All pretentious in their highly educated status, showing how caring and cultured they are by getting drunk and dancing all night in the name of supporting the less fortunate who are being tortured, starved, and killed. It struck me as an ugly scene but extremely illustrative of this group of middle class people. I was told that Oppenheimer was famously hard to get along with, but instead of showing us that, we see that compared to his social circle he was the lovable puppy in the crowd, at least at the beginning. So that was a curious creative choice.
This whole show is pretty much questionable creative choices, actually. Considering how curious a choice of subject matter this wholly American story is for a small British production to begin with, every decision thereafter seemed rushed or at least ill-advised. The frequent little science lessons were the most effective and entertaining parts of the show, kind of like how the best part of “The Big Bang Theory” is any actual science you learn amid the drivel. As far as I could tell, the mini lectures and the discussion-based lessons Oppy’s protégés gave us were accurate. Then again I wouldn’t really know. I mean they were talking about the science behind the atom bomb. If you really understood it you would have been there. When they talked about science, the play was at its most natural and interesting. Then again I liked school. We learn about atom composition, atom splitting, all kinds of things. Through these lessons and science-focused conversations, we learn with them that Germans split the atom, letting loose a whole bunch of crap and energy. Our Murkan scientists freak the f out, as you do, and realized holy crap, this could lead to enormous explosions to end all explosions, possibly igniting the earth’s atmosphere, or destroying the earth, or at least countries! Then they realized, holy crap, we really need to get ahead of the Germans on this so we win the war. That was at least one of the accurate points, that they were always racing to get ahead of the Germans, whom we assumed were indeed ahead of us, when in fact they knew pretty much nothing the whole time.
Things pick up from here, as Oppy gathers the finest minds in science (or at least northern California), then the military takes over as it does, and the whole shebang becomes the super secret Manhattan Project.
The military’s involvement/control is obviously a mixed blessing. They get resources, power, land, and uranium, but also lots of bullshit and awfulness. Any red-leaning brains (everyone we met in the beginning) get shipped off to war or to Alaska because Murka was awful afear’d back then of people who may have thought differently. The interference with (or, often, hindrance of) science in the name of democracy is an extremely frustrating and terrifying thing that the military enjoyed doing. Good thing the government lets science be now!
As more progress is made on the bomb, Oppy becomes more and more of a righteous jackass, as the weight of what he’s doing weighs on him. Or doesn’t. We hear a lot of big speeches about how Oppy is lead and ytterbium and iron, stable at the core, and that he carries the responsibility without it breaking him. I guess it was supposed to be an ironic statement of stability? or disaffectedness? Because obviously it broke or at least injured him. But that wasn’t clear. It was more of a disconnect between words and actions than it was irony. Like unintentional disjunction. (I’m looking at you, Mr. Director.)
A lot is said about how Oppy was chosen to lead the project because the military could control or at least predict his behavior. As they wanted, he broke off contact with his commie brother for a long time, he turned friends in to the inquisitors, he shipped off some of his best students to war and refused to help them when they returned. He got real jerky like. I mean, if you were spending the prime of your life devoted to ending others’ lives, you’d prob go dark like Emma’s doing right now on “Once Upon A Time” (best show ever??). but the repeated thesis that he was unbreakable (they alive, dammit!) and resilient came across more incorrect than poignant.
At least Oppy was played by a decent actor, John Heffernan. I thought he was pretty good and then when I recognized him from the new BBC series “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” (which I was lucky enough to see a sneak preview of recently because I’m so important in the London entertainment scene) my thoughts were confirmed because only the best people are in that show. But there was a lot of not-so-decent acting on display here. I have issues with mainstem West End shows lately, so this (it’s like an off-West End production) had more. Everyone seemed a slight notch below where they should have been, especially with their American accents. Say your freaking r’s! And every time anyone said the word ‘sir’ but with another word coming after it, it became ‘suh’ and just ugh come on. Also no one could say ‘apparently’ without it getting super loose in the vowels when in American the vowels need to be constricted. I feel like dialect coaches are not valued anymore.
Everything just seemed a little jumbled, likely due to direction. Funnily enough, at the beginning, I despised Oppy’s girlfriend Jean and his friend’s wife Charlotte with the weird New England WASP country club/faux Katherine Hepburn accent. But by the end, these two actresses, Catherine Steadman and Sandy Foster, were my favorites. I don’t know if they got better with more meaty scenes, if I got nicer, or if it was just the power of comparison working in their favor.
One person I did not like was Oppy’s wife Kitty, played by Thomasin Rand. Maybe because that name is ludicrous, but I couldn’t get a handle on her. I don’t know if you’re supposed to hate her of if you’re supposed to feel bad for her because her husband is so preoccupied and she’s always (always) pregnant (and drinking to the point of alcoholism and smoking like a chimney throughout), but I didn’t. Or maybe her hatefulness comes from her husband’s stated lack of ability to connect or form real bonds and she’s like I left that foppish but super polite British guy for this? (And yes we see the very awkward courtship between Oppy and Kitty as they have an affair, get pregnant, and then ask said British guy for a divorce. He, by the way, had the funniest accent in the whole play, which was odd because he’s the only one who gets to be his real nationality. It was like an American doing an over-the-top British accent but the actor was really British, so I loved it. I hope it was on purpose.)
Or maybe it’s because her husband may have been in love with another woman the whole time. His earlier love, Jean, was clearly always special to him and their deep connection seemed to have persisted until her unfortunate suicide. She was unable to deal with her chemically unbalanced mind and the FBI agents tapping her phone and sitting outside her house all day and night because of her political views and ties to Oppy. It was all very upsetting and tragic. After her death, we get more reason to despise Oppy and Kitty as they agree that suicide is extremely self-centered and that Jean was super selfish for killing herself. At least they agreed on something? I wonder how accurate this portrayal was, because that’s a big black mark to paint on a person’s character. Do not like.
I wonder how accurate all of it was, actually. If all of Oppy’s contacts were under government surveillance for their political views, if the general in charge was really somehow everywhere all the time and in every important science discussion, if the captain on the project talked in an exaggerated American accent like he was just pulled from the set of “A Few Good Men”, if one of Oppy’s protégés apparently learned his American accent from the aforementioned “Big Bang Theory” (he sounded exactly like Sheldon and was my fave part). One of my favorite characters was Edward Teller, the Hungarian scientist who created the hydrogen bomb, or ‘super’. In the show, he was pushing Oppy to focus on the super during WW2, which seemed early but was apparently accurate, despite no real work being done on it until after the war. Ben Allen, the actor playing Teller, was pretty funny at times and made Teller one of the most sympathetic characters onstage, which I’m not sure was the intent given that Teller in real life was kind of a lunatic. So I’m told, I don’t know.
The first act had a lot of good learning and commies and New Mexico and more commies and excitement and stuff. The second act, hoo boy, it kind of fell apart in ways you could not imagine. First of all, at 1.5 hours each act, the play was way too long for what they did with the time. Do shows not have editors anymore? Act II could easily be 30-40 minutes shorter. Here’s what they should do: First, cut the kid. When we are supposed to assume they’ve dropped the first bomb, a child climbs out of the sunroof of the bomb, which is on stage, and he GIVES A MONOLOGUE. A kid that we have not met before, just this random punk kid with THE WORST American accent who has a few ridiculously pretentious paragraphs to recite about life and death and ephemerality maybe and who knows what and of course he messed up a line. He had literally one job. CUT THAT. It was nonsense and it brought the show to a screeching halt and not only added nothing but significantly detracted from the impact. I almost screamed for them to get the hook.
Next, cut the really freaky deaky and out of place bongo-drum circle and drug-induced drunken rave that followed the first test run of the bomb that occurred UNDER THE BOMB ACTING AS A DISCO BALL. I kid you not. I’m sure this wackadoo scene may have worked in some incarnation of this play, but it was not the one I saw. You can’t have a straight serious play and then throw in one super trippy conceptual scene for shits and giggles. It was completely weird with every character giving mini pretentious monologues about, well, life and death and ephemerality and who knows what while the rest of the cast was waving their arms in prayer to the gods of explosions in the fire and doing tribal chants like they were in a goddamn regional production of “Hair” while on acid. For like 10 minutes, sandwiched between serious science and black & white scenes, we uncomfortably watched this rave while the actors said lines like “The sun shone brightly like a diamond.” Well that might be Rhianna but you get my point. Omg.
Then, cut the next false ending of big grand speeches (yes there are more) that are terribly written and unnatural in Oppy and Bob’s classroom. I REALLY didn’t need to hear that bit about the horse Bob saw in Hiroshima after the bomb dropped. It was really graphic and disturbing but without the slightest need for it. I really didn’t appreciate that. So many sentences in this back half of Act II no one would ever say in real life, like overly wordy high school English essay kind of writing, when you think you sound smart but it actually makes you sound dumber.
I was thinking, such an important story should have been done better. But, then I thought, wait, is it such an important story? It is necessary to know the guy who built the atomic bomb and what not, but is this section of his life story necessary? Do we need to know he was kind of a jerk and had shitty friends and was a shitty friend and suffered a lot? And if so, why? His brilliant mind helped us do massacring of a newfangled variety, which the world is thankful for in a grotesque way, but was he necessary? Even his wife asks the general at some point why they didn’t pick Einstein or another great scientist who could have done it. The answer in this show is that the leader of this project needed this project to be his career highlight, and the other big name scientists already had other significant achievements in their careers. Cool. A more interesting story would have continued to the government’s turning on him after the war and their awful investigation into his political views, kind of like how the British government turned on Alan Turing after the war after he freaking saved their lives those ungrateful ignorant assholes. God knows in three hours would could have covered all of that. But we didn’t really get to it, probably because of all the unnecessary speechifying. So there were some really interesting choices made in this play. I’m not sure they worked, but despite all the weirdness it was still pretty good. I just wish they had hired an editor.
AUDIENCE: CONGRATULATIONS, Oppenheimer audience! This was the first time in many years that I did not see a cell phone being used during the show. I mean, that is pretty remarkable. However, there was this awful young couple behind me who talked the entire time. And I mean the entire time. I regret not saying something at intermission but I feared them cutting my hair during Act II or something. I did give them the good old death stare a few times though. I am proud of that.
Things pick up from here, as Oppy gathers the finest minds in science (or at least northern California), then the military takes over as it does, and the whole shebang becomes the super secret Manhattan Project.
The military’s involvement/control is obviously a mixed blessing. They get resources, power, land, and uranium, but also lots of bullshit and awfulness. Any red-leaning brains (everyone we met in the beginning) get shipped off to war or to Alaska because Murka was awful afear’d back then of people who may have thought differently. The interference with (or, often, hindrance of) science in the name of democracy is an extremely frustrating and terrifying thing that the military enjoyed doing. Good thing the government lets science be now!
As more progress is made on the bomb, Oppy becomes more and more of a righteous jackass, as the weight of what he’s doing weighs on him. Or doesn’t. We hear a lot of big speeches about how Oppy is lead and ytterbium and iron, stable at the core, and that he carries the responsibility without it breaking him. I guess it was supposed to be an ironic statement of stability? or disaffectedness? Because obviously it broke or at least injured him. But that wasn’t clear. It was more of a disconnect between words and actions than it was irony. Like unintentional disjunction. (I’m looking at you, Mr. Director.)
A lot is said about how Oppy was chosen to lead the project because the military could control or at least predict his behavior. As they wanted, he broke off contact with his commie brother for a long time, he turned friends in to the inquisitors, he shipped off some of his best students to war and refused to help them when they returned. He got real jerky like. I mean, if you were spending the prime of your life devoted to ending others’ lives, you’d prob go dark like Emma’s doing right now on “Once Upon A Time” (best show ever??). but the repeated thesis that he was unbreakable (they alive, dammit!) and resilient came across more incorrect than poignant.
At least Oppy was played by a decent actor, John Heffernan. I thought he was pretty good and then when I recognized him from the new BBC series “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” (which I was lucky enough to see a sneak preview of recently because I’m so important in the London entertainment scene) my thoughts were confirmed because only the best people are in that show. But there was a lot of not-so-decent acting on display here. I have issues with mainstem West End shows lately, so this (it’s like an off-West End production) had more. Everyone seemed a slight notch below where they should have been, especially with their American accents. Say your freaking r’s! And every time anyone said the word ‘sir’ but with another word coming after it, it became ‘suh’ and just ugh come on. Also no one could say ‘apparently’ without it getting super loose in the vowels when in American the vowels need to be constricted. I feel like dialect coaches are not valued anymore.
Everything just seemed a little jumbled, likely due to direction. Funnily enough, at the beginning, I despised Oppy’s girlfriend Jean and his friend’s wife Charlotte with the weird New England WASP country club/faux Katherine Hepburn accent. But by the end, these two actresses, Catherine Steadman and Sandy Foster, were my favorites. I don’t know if they got better with more meaty scenes, if I got nicer, or if it was just the power of comparison working in their favor.
One person I did not like was Oppy’s wife Kitty, played by Thomasin Rand. Maybe because that name is ludicrous, but I couldn’t get a handle on her. I don’t know if you’re supposed to hate her of if you’re supposed to feel bad for her because her husband is so preoccupied and she’s always (always) pregnant (and drinking to the point of alcoholism and smoking like a chimney throughout), but I didn’t. Or maybe her hatefulness comes from her husband’s stated lack of ability to connect or form real bonds and she’s like I left that foppish but super polite British guy for this? (And yes we see the very awkward courtship between Oppy and Kitty as they have an affair, get pregnant, and then ask said British guy for a divorce. He, by the way, had the funniest accent in the whole play, which was odd because he’s the only one who gets to be his real nationality. It was like an American doing an over-the-top British accent but the actor was really British, so I loved it. I hope it was on purpose.)
Or maybe it’s because her husband may have been in love with another woman the whole time. His earlier love, Jean, was clearly always special to him and their deep connection seemed to have persisted until her unfortunate suicide. She was unable to deal with her chemically unbalanced mind and the FBI agents tapping her phone and sitting outside her house all day and night because of her political views and ties to Oppy. It was all very upsetting and tragic. After her death, we get more reason to despise Oppy and Kitty as they agree that suicide is extremely self-centered and that Jean was super selfish for killing herself. At least they agreed on something? I wonder how accurate this portrayal was, because that’s a big black mark to paint on a person’s character. Do not like.
I wonder how accurate all of it was, actually. If all of Oppy’s contacts were under government surveillance for their political views, if the general in charge was really somehow everywhere all the time and in every important science discussion, if the captain on the project talked in an exaggerated American accent like he was just pulled from the set of “A Few Good Men”, if one of Oppy’s protégés apparently learned his American accent from the aforementioned “Big Bang Theory” (he sounded exactly like Sheldon and was my fave part). One of my favorite characters was Edward Teller, the Hungarian scientist who created the hydrogen bomb, or ‘super’. In the show, he was pushing Oppy to focus on the super during WW2, which seemed early but was apparently accurate, despite no real work being done on it until after the war. Ben Allen, the actor playing Teller, was pretty funny at times and made Teller one of the most sympathetic characters onstage, which I’m not sure was the intent given that Teller in real life was kind of a lunatic. So I’m told, I don’t know.
The first act had a lot of good learning and commies and New Mexico and more commies and excitement and stuff. The second act, hoo boy, it kind of fell apart in ways you could not imagine. First of all, at 1.5 hours each act, the play was way too long for what they did with the time. Do shows not have editors anymore? Act II could easily be 30-40 minutes shorter. Here’s what they should do: First, cut the kid. When we are supposed to assume they’ve dropped the first bomb, a child climbs out of the sunroof of the bomb, which is on stage, and he GIVES A MONOLOGUE. A kid that we have not met before, just this random punk kid with THE WORST American accent who has a few ridiculously pretentious paragraphs to recite about life and death and ephemerality maybe and who knows what and of course he messed up a line. He had literally one job. CUT THAT. It was nonsense and it brought the show to a screeching halt and not only added nothing but significantly detracted from the impact. I almost screamed for them to get the hook.
Next, cut the really freaky deaky and out of place bongo-drum circle and drug-induced drunken rave that followed the first test run of the bomb that occurred UNDER THE BOMB ACTING AS A DISCO BALL. I kid you not. I’m sure this wackadoo scene may have worked in some incarnation of this play, but it was not the one I saw. You can’t have a straight serious play and then throw in one super trippy conceptual scene for shits and giggles. It was completely weird with every character giving mini pretentious monologues about, well, life and death and ephemerality and who knows what while the rest of the cast was waving their arms in prayer to the gods of explosions in the fire and doing tribal chants like they were in a goddamn regional production of “Hair” while on acid. For like 10 minutes, sandwiched between serious science and black & white scenes, we uncomfortably watched this rave while the actors said lines like “The sun shone brightly like a diamond.” Well that might be Rhianna but you get my point. Omg.
Then, cut the next false ending of big grand speeches (yes there are more) that are terribly written and unnatural in Oppy and Bob’s classroom. I REALLY didn’t need to hear that bit about the horse Bob saw in Hiroshima after the bomb dropped. It was really graphic and disturbing but without the slightest need for it. I really didn’t appreciate that. So many sentences in this back half of Act II no one would ever say in real life, like overly wordy high school English essay kind of writing, when you think you sound smart but it actually makes you sound dumber.
I was thinking, such an important story should have been done better. But, then I thought, wait, is it such an important story? It is necessary to know the guy who built the atomic bomb and what not, but is this section of his life story necessary? Do we need to know he was kind of a jerk and had shitty friends and was a shitty friend and suffered a lot? And if so, why? His brilliant mind helped us do massacring of a newfangled variety, which the world is thankful for in a grotesque way, but was he necessary? Even his wife asks the general at some point why they didn’t pick Einstein or another great scientist who could have done it. The answer in this show is that the leader of this project needed this project to be his career highlight, and the other big name scientists already had other significant achievements in their careers. Cool. A more interesting story would have continued to the government’s turning on him after the war and their awful investigation into his political views, kind of like how the British government turned on Alan Turing after the war after he freaking saved their lives those ungrateful ignorant assholes. God knows in three hours would could have covered all of that. But we didn’t really get to it, probably because of all the unnecessary speechifying. So there were some really interesting choices made in this play. I’m not sure they worked, but despite all the weirdness it was still pretty good. I just wish they had hired an editor.
AUDIENCE: CONGRATULATIONS, Oppenheimer audience! This was the first time in many years that I did not see a cell phone being used during the show. I mean, that is pretty remarkable. However, there was this awful young couple behind me who talked the entire time. And I mean the entire time. I regret not saying something at intermission but I feared them cutting my hair during Act II or something. I did give them the good old death stare a few times though. I am proud of that.
“The Autumn of My Springtime” at Tbilisi’s Marionette Theatre
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we’re talking about “The Autumn of My Springtime”, at Tbilisi, Georgia’s famed Marionette Theatre.
Well, this is a first! Puppets scare me so I haven’t really sought out puppet shows – or as the fancy people call the fancier kind, ‘marionette theatre’. But a visit to the Rezo Gabriadze Theatre in Tbilisi, Georgia (not that Georgia) (unless you thought of the former-Soviet country (then you’d be right)) is one of the must-dos when visiting that city. I don’t know about you, but when I think marionette show, I think of John Cusack creepy AF in “Being John Malkovich”, a performance that still gives me nightmares because he made Malkovich’s entire life about creepy puppets?? Malko was in the og sunken place! So sad. Or I think of the ‘I got no strings to hold me down’ bit from Pinocchio and that’s equally terrifying so yeah, I’d usually say nah thanks to marionettes with their creepy faces and their creepy small but emotive hands. But now I will first think of Rezo Gabriadze’s surprisingly poignant show “The Autumn of My Springtime” and how wonderful it is. I’m not rushing out to see more scary puppets, but I fully insist that all Tbilisi visitors do.
The Gabriadze theatre performs their marionette shows in repertory, with current offerings including 4 well received plays written and directed by Rezo himself. Everyone (niche theatre reviewers) had been talking about one play in particular called “Stalingrad” which you can imagine is important in these parts so we were initially disappointed that a showing of that play didn’t line up with our free night in Tbilisi. But now I’m so glad that that show wasn’t on because the one we saw was fantastic. “The Autumn of My Springtime”, performed in Georgian with English supertitles, tells the story of an old Soviet couple, Valram and Domna, and their…pet? friend? confidante? bird named Boris. When the show begins with Boris the orange bird saying “Two things amaze me, morality and the stars”, you know shit’s gonna be interesting.
The show begins with old man Valram, a very old man indeed, talking to his bird-friend Boris about how tired his poor heart is. The puppeteers, five adults dressed in black, soon vanish into the background and you focus only on the intricate, perfectly tuned movements of the ancient doll. Anyone who has seen “Avenue Q” knows how easy it is to go from “How am I going to focus on the puppets and not stare at the human actors the entire time?” to “Omg I forgot these were puppets”. Valram’s hands lifting to gesture despite it taking all his energy was so realistic and moving that when he soon died (like five minutes in, so not a spoiler) (actually we’re going to be giving all the spoilers but odds are you aren’t seeing this so whatevs), it was quite sad.
So Boris takes it upon himself to look after Domna, the ancient wife of Valram, now that her husband is gone and she needs to pay the bills. Boris is often referred to endearingly (or maybe grammatically; it might just be a sentence structure thing but that’s less adorable) as Boria, and little Boria is all that Domna has now (though the relationship is still unclear) (as it is a bird). Domna’s mannerisms were like Valram’s, that precise articulation that makes you forget that they’re puppets. The work was so impressive. Boris the Bird’s puppeteer had a much less precise job, since the little orange shock of feathers really just had to keep fluttering the whole time, but he was onstage for most of the show and I assume that gets exhausting.
Boria sells all of Domna’s belongings to a moneylender friend to get her going, and I’m prettayyyyy sure the moneylender friend’s name was – I shit you not – SHALOM. At first I thought the dude riding the bicycle maniacally and singing about his life and money and biking was just repeatedly shouting Shalom so the audience knew he was a jew but I realized/husband told me that he was just shouting his name over and over, because that’s less weird, and that his name happened to be Shalom. Of course it was. And of course the moneylender was Jewish. Oh mild racism.
After the super random moneylender-on-a-giant-bicycle scene where I thought hmm this is kind of nutty, it went super off the rails nutty, to places I never could have imagined, yet remained, somehow, grounded in relatable humanity. The next scene featured little Boria going to the bank and talking to his friend…the statue on the door of the bank. The statue was named Dionidas, and he was in love with a girl who danced around nearby. Like a human girl, I think. He referred to her as his flora, his fauna, and Boris saw an opportunity in his friend’s love. Boris helps Dionidas the talking statue and the human lady reconcile, so the statue is supes happy and opens the doors (his torso?) and lets his birdfriend take some money from the bank. No big deal, easy as pie. The harder part is for Boria to find a way to give the money to Domna without her knowing that he robbed a bank. (Does it count as robbing if the guarding statue lets you take the money?) So he repeatedly just ‘happens’ to find oh a 25 ruble note here, a 25 ruble note there, for Domna’s benefit. When he tells her how he found each one, he begins by saying “Oh I laughed so hard, you wouldn’t believe how hard I laughed – I found this 25 ruble note in a tree/in a bucket/falling from an airplane/pinned to an accordionist’s face” (these are all real examples). Finally Domna is like “Stop lying to me ya damn bird! I know you didn’t just find this money!” but she does get all her possessions back from Shylock so she kind of doesn’t care?
There’s no time for figuring out Domna’s position on the matter though, because Boris is ready to parrrrtayyyyy. The bird (remember, this is a bird) goes to what looks like a British Christmas party with lots of drunk worker-looking men and lots of drunk women dressed like secretaries in a place that looks like a bowling alley. They forgo puppets for this scene and have mostly giant cardboard people bopping up and down. There’s a big toast Boris and the men give and this is literally what it was: “God bless Georgian heavy industry and its women with light morals!” Then Boris may have raped a woman but it was all very unclear considering that he is a bird and the woman was a gigantic cardboard cutout and before you can say ‘wait what the hell’ the cardboard cutouts of all the women lift up their skirts to show their underwear and I was like whaaaat isssss happpppening. This was by far the most random scene I’ve seen in pretty much anything ever. Also it was unnecessary; I don’t get why it was in this show, but I guess that toast was pretty good.
But things aren’t all fun and games for little Boria, because the cops may be on to him. He did rob a bank, remember? The cops – and one giant officer on a giant horse – barge into Domna’s house since she is his main known associate looking for the little ‘sky tramp’ as they amazingly call Boris. But Domna’s like ‘I haven’t seen him in a while but also I’m not his master or anything he is a wild bird who just happens to talk and do human stuff like rob banks and drink alcohol’ and the cops are like ‘well if you see him tell him he’s in big trouble mister because he robbed a bank and also he flew into a movie theatre and tried to kiss the projection of Vivian Leigh and ended up poking holes in the screen (this is a real thing they said) and also he is causing all kinds of problems and ruckus and the people are outraged because they hate sky tramps and we need to arrest him’ and despite Boris being the only friend she has in the world, Domna doesn’t really seem too broken up about it, but I guess that’s that Soviet external show of strength that babushkas pride themselves on.
Meanwhile, Boris is out flying by the window of a woman named Ninel, yes a human woman whom he is in love with. And she’s in love with him. We learn from their conversation that they fell in love in middle school (???) when she was trying to learn and he was flapping outside the window distracting her and now they can’t be together and they bemoan the fact by talking shit about Charles Darwin. I’m not kidding. Boria yells “Damn you Charles Darwin and your ape ancestors!” and Ninel cries “What did Charles Darwin ever know about love” and we were kicking each other so hard.
But unfortunately, the cops find Boris and trap him in a bucket (“anything but the bucket!” Boris screams) and he goes to jail, the awful kind where he has to wear black and white striped clothes on his tiny bird body and it’s kind of hilarious. Domna makes the arduous climb to visit him and despite her stern demeanor she shows how much she cares in their conversation about how he’s holding up. And in this exchange comes my favorite line in the whole thing that made me laugh so hard in a quiet theatre where no one else thought this was a particularly funny line but I was there CACKLING. Domna inquires about the conditions and, wanting to protect his health from the outside chill, she tells Boris: “Ask the other prisoners if you can change beds, farther from the window – tell them that you’re sick, say you’re a bird…” SAY YOU’RE A BIRD! HAHAHAHAH I was struggling not to scream-laugh. Like I’m p sure they’d know he was a bird from the start but I loveeee using that as an excuse.
Domna’s little peasant life is rocked quite a bit from the scandal, and she tries to avoid the prying eyes and unwelcome comments from nosy neighbors. But she can’t get away from one such neighbor, a very bad man who corners her and comments on Boris: “If he had raped someone, say a sparrow, or a pigeon, or a nightingale, I would have defended him, saying it was a crime of passion. But stealing money from the communal funds is unforgivable.” Man aliiive this is some commie bullshit! It reminded me of a North Korean movie I once saw that repeated lines like “all praise our great leader for allowing this” and “we are all important parts of the machine that makes our great country turn” or whatever crap like that from dictatorships. Yeesh.
Anyway, the day of Boris’s trial arrives, and since he’s hundo p guilty the big decision is whether Domna should be punished as an accomplice. Boria is adamant that his friend is innocent, even though she benefited from his crime, because she didn’t know and she’s just a poor old lady who will die soon anyway. The prosecutor is really mean and scary but luckily the judge – a GIGANTIC cardboard cutout of an old man in a double-breasted cardigan, because that’s what judges wear while sitting on the bench in any country – lets Domna go. Boris is sentenced to a life spent in a window display in a hunter’s shop, which is RULL disturbing but I guess better than the gulag? Boris asks for permission to give a speech before beginning his sentence and the judge allows it, and the speech he wanted to give was just to scream his lungs out at the mean prosecutor and it was SPELL-BINDING. The best part by far was when Boris A BIRD yells at him “I’LL SHIT ON YOUR FATHER’S GRAVE 23 TIMES YOU CROSS-EYED SCUM!” true story!
Okay I know I’ve shared all absolutely ridiculous or hilarious bits of this play and you’re probably thinking ‘um didn’t you say that this was moving and poignant” and it really was despite well everything I’ve been talking about. Through all the jokes and things I found to be funny even if they weren’t jokes, they were telling the story of a woman who had no hope in the world except this friend, who risked and gave up everything to help her survive. And to top that all off, he wasn’t human, yet he was the only one to show some humanity. And then he got kind of out of control and broke tons of laws but isn’t that the most human part of all? The ending packed a punch, with Boria in his shop window, passing his time, when the officer comes to visit and tells him to go mourn for Domna because no one else is. Yes, Domna has died, and Boris needs to pay his respects at her grave, which is next to Valram’s, where we began. Boris, however, is shot when he approaches – whether randomly, or by the hunter whose shop he sits in, or by the cops who may have set him up, it’s unclear (I’m going with the cops though) – and he struggles with all his might to make it atop his friends’ graves before his body gives out. It’s pretty dire, heartbreaking, as he makes it to his resting place with the people he cared about most. Boris says some deep stuff about humanity in his final moments as well as throughout the show, and despite being a bird, he nails the injustice and the sadness and the need for someone to care about you. And it’s quite lovely. AND he gives us incredible quotes that we’ve been shouting all week like SAY YOU’RE A BIRD! and “I’LL SHIT ON YOUR FATHER’S GRAVE 23 TIMES YOU CROSS-EYED SCUM!” Anyway, go see puppet shows if you are ever in Tbilisi. Amazing work, Rezo.
AUDIENCE
All Russian tourists who were pretty okay, although we prepped for it to be the worst audience ever since it was a tourist thing so anything better than that was a nice surprise.
THEATRE
The theatre is a semi-small single room upstairs from the nice wooden lobby. There are only two bathroom stalls but that wasn’t a problem for me because I had THE BEST SEAT and you need to get it if you go – B1. The second row, but the first seat on that aisle for some reason sticks much further out that all the other rows so I was closest to the door! Heyoooo! They also had this amazing No Cell Phone symbol in the corner of the ceiling, which I believe every single theatre should have.
Lobby
best seat ever
best sign ever