Director, Playwright, Essayist
The following is a New York Times review of The Brothers Karamazov, Part II. The review can be found at
By MARGO JEFFERSON
Published: January 13, 2004, Tuesday
It's good to step outside the security of our homeland culture. Nothing can be taken for granted. History changes, but so does the meaning of words. Depending on the situation, words like freedom and tyranny and faith have different applications and consequences. When does faith constrict freedom? When does freedom become a cover-up for tyranny? Most important, who has the power to define these words?
This month audiences at the LaMama Experimental Theater Club on the Lower East Side can enter the corrupt czarist world of 19th-century Russia and the rapacious Communist one of 20th-century Poland. ''The Brothers Karamazov: Part II,'' the Eleventh Hour Theater's adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novel, is playing in the huge Annex theater, while two one-act plays, ''Striptease'' and ''Out at Sea'' by the Polish writer Slawomir Mrozek, are tucked into the intimate first-floor theater next door. All three works run through Sunday.
So many 19th-century novels were published in serial form that they often work best as serialized television dramas. This ''Karamazov'' began as a six-part stage serial with six directors, but it ended up as a two-part project split into two four-hour evenings, both adapted and directed by Alexander Harrington.
Part 1 played at the Culture Project last February. If you missed or have forgotten much of it, do not fear. Part 2 begins with a fine, fast summary. The actors move swiftly onto the stage, striking the poses that best capture their characters. Then, alternating between narrative and dialogue, they fill us in and whet our appetite for what's to come.
It's story theater: we watch the page take on stage life. Here is Fyodor Karamazov, a greedy landowner turned moneylender; here is his eldest son, Dmitri, the lustful hot-tempered ex-army officer who quarrels bitterly and constantly with his father over money and the love of Grushenka, a beautiful, shrewdly wanton Polish woman. Shortly after the play begins, Dmitri will be accused of killing his father. He will be defended by his half-brothers: Ivan, the freethinking cynic who declared that ''when god does not exist, everything is permitted'' and debates the devil at night in his room at night; and kind, pure-hearted Alyosha, a novice in a monastery. And don't forget Pavel Smerdyakov, Fydor's illegitimate son, reduced to being his devious, house servant.
So many high emotions and vehement declarations. ''We are all cruel. We are all monsters. We all make children suffer.'' ''I'm so ashamed -- I'm ashamed of my whole life.'' ''I am a servant, sir. If my betters see fit to make a fool of me, I must endure.'' So many minor but unforgettable figures, too: a mad peasant woman snatching toys from her dying son; a rich widow who knows just how to torment men who try to borrow money.
In a just theater world, audiences would be able to see this production -- which is resourcefully staged and intelligently dramatized -- over two nights. (Or, combined with Part 1, over four).
The following is a New York Post review of The Brothers Karamazov, Part I. The review can be found at
http://nypost.com/2003/02/13/half-of-bros-k-is-ok/
HALF OF BROS. K. IS OK
By Donald Lyons
February 13, 2003 | 5:00am
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, PART 1
Culture Project, 45 Bleecker St.. Through Feb. 23. Call (212) 388-2713.
STAGING a huge, crowded classic novel is a crazy proposition and has to be done with energy and passion.
The dramatization of “Nicholas Nickleby” succeeded at it years ago,as did the Manhattan Ensemble Theatre with Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot” and Kafka’s “The Castle.”
Now comes the latest example of success against all the odds: a dramatic version of Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” (1880).
(Actually, only the first half of the play is being staged – the whole thing would take eight hours, and this takes four.)
Adapter-director Alexander Harrington gets the basics right: he lets the people, with their obsessions from the carnal to the religious, take their time to breathe and think and feel and suffer.
Central is the Karamazov family, led by money-lending father Fyodor and his three sons: passionate Dmitry, intellectual Ivan and mystic Alyosha. Particularly sharp are Gregory Sims as Dmitry and Joel Carino as Ivan. These two clash over women: Dmitry’s fiancée Katya, an intensely neurotic quasi-lesbian (a fierce Jennifer Gibbs), and the sensual, mercurial Grushenka (a captivating Sorrel Tomlinson).
Watching these machinations with a sad face is Alyosha, enacted with a brave, compassionate demeanor by Stephen Reyes.
Best are the passages where the brothers and the father intensely debate the existence of God and immortality.
Dostoevsky may not have been a great thinker, but with Harrington’s help, he makes an engaging playwright. And the vodka and goodies they serve before the show and during intermission don’t hurt, either.
The follwing is a review of The Brothers Karamazov, Part I from The New Yorker's website.
The following is a New York Post Review of Richard II. The Review can be found at
http://nypost.com/2000/06/30/here-playing-at-kings-the-thing/
HERE, PLAYING AT KING’S THE THING
By Donald Lyons
June 30, 2000 | 4:00am
‘RICHARD II” is a compelling look at a man born to play a king, but not to be a king.
Callum Keith-King superbly gives us Richard as an eloquent, theatrical, thoroughly macho presence, the very incarnation of a king. He’s a man who can play a king most convincingly – but who cannot bother to get the allegiance of anybody important in the kingdom.
Director Alexander Harrington persuasively presents the Shakespeare play as the case of a man spectacularly gifted to seem the king.
He sits aloft in a remote throne; he wears a white cloak; he later uncrowns himself with a great sense of theatrical bravado; still later, he languishes soulfully in prison, in a white shirt, and compares himself to an actor and to Jesus.
It is worth seeing Harrington’s “Richard II” for the clarity of his vision of the play and the simplicity and directness of his presentation. This is Shakespeare straight and without frills.Characters mime encounters on horseback; all the outdoor action takes place against a wonderfully pale backdrop.In fact, more dramatic simplification would be welcome: The medieval costumes are unnecessary and such props as dueling gloves are awkwardly literal. Harrington should have taken his vision further.
But the key performers are fine in the service of this reading of the play. Keith-King makes a striking king – always on top of the ceremony.
The king’s unpleasant moments, such as seizing Gaunt’s property, seem off-hand and trivial – this king’s vision of himself is troubled by such things. Forced to create such spectacles as his own uncrowning, Keith-King theatricalizes with abandon and seeming sincerity. He is a master of the rhetoric of kingship and knows how a king should be treated. Deposed, he still remains superior in eloquence and glamour to his foe, Henry.
He bids farewell to his queen (the moving Lori Putnam) with articulate emotion. He seems to grow in glamour as he declines in power, taking on a poetic eloquence as he compares the prison to the world.
Ned Coulter’s Henry Bolingbroke, the usurping king, is a man on whom events smile, but who has not the language to express his desires or accomplishments. He assumes supreme power from the despised Richard, but knows not how to embrace it, how to be happy in it. Henry’s victory is obliterated by Richard’s self-dramatizing loss.Coulter never occupies that throne on stage right.
Keith-King’s Richard enjoys being center stage, but doesn’t understand the job; Coulter’s Henry does the job, but can’t dramatize himself.
It was an English tragedy – and Harrington’s production gets this.
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The following is a New York Post review of Henry V. The review can be found at
http://nypost.com/1999/06/04/majesty-in-a-spartan-space/
MAJESTY IN A SPARTAN SPACE
By Donald Lyons
June 4, 1999 | 4:00am
SUMMER means Shakespeare. Movie stars do the Bard in pretty New England towns, while every hamlet worth its salt stages a free “Hamlet” on the village green. Locally, there’ll be free Shakespeare in Central Park, Shakespeare in the Park(ing Lot) on Ludlow Street, and Shakespeare in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.
Getting things going is a superb “Henry V” at LaMama (74A E. Fourth St., through June 13). Using a small, spare, bare space and actors outfitted in black pants and baggy red shirts, director Alexander Harrington makes artistic lemonade.
He even manages to convey a sense of spectacle, bustle and urgency as actors rush up and down a staircase and withdraw to a jutting balcony above.
Mainly, though, this “Henry V” wants us to hear and feel and think about this crowded, contradictory play, an anatomy of power and war.
In 1945, Laurence Olivier’s Henry was a glamorous prince; in 1989, Kenneth Branagh’s Henry was a sinister schemer. In 1945 war was noble; in 1989 war stank; in 1999, the year of Serbia, we are forced to look at all sides.
The key here is a terrific Henry. Callum Keith-King creates a strong, fiery, articulate, rather humorless politician – able to be, when necessary, a roughneck soldier, a charismatic general, a cold-eyed killer, a compassionate mourner or a sweet wooer. Perfectly willing to slay traitors, civilians and prisoners, he is also capable, in victory, of mercy, modesty and piety.
Harrington lets the play’s multiple perspectives speak for themselves: Nouvella Nelson’s compellingly played chorus giving us the big picture; the bonding warriors; the complaining common soldiers; the haughty-but-human French. Alex Kilgore’s Dauphin is also good.
As Henry and his men encircle a dead English boy to sing a dirge, we wonder if it was worth all the blood. There is no easy answer.
Where Harrington doesn’t quite succeed is in offering us a credible (if equally corrupt) alternative to the nobility, despite the vivid performances by Lynne McCollough as a sensible Nell Quickly, Jim Hunter as a dryly disillusioned Boy, and Eric Brooks as a pungent Flu-ellen.
Overall, though, this “Henry V” is a riveting meditation on the heart of the matter – the simultaneous cruelty and glamour of power.