Sam Gold challenges expectations of the classic play

It’s tempting to dismiss Look Back In Anger, to say, “I get it. Realism. Kitchen sink. Angry young man.” But with his current revival at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre, director Sam Gold wants to blow those assumptions apart.

That’s only fitting, since John Osborne’s play has always been about subverting the familiar. When it premiered in London in 1956, British theatre was lousy with boulevard comedies and polite drawing room dramas. Look Back in Anger, however, delivered Jimmy Porter, an intelligent but frustrated working class sweet seller who lives in a squalid apartment with his friend Cliff and his upper-middle-class wife, Alison. The British class system oppresses these people, and in turn, they oppress themselves with an endless cycle of insults, apologies, kisses, and arguments.

It’s hard to overstate how shocking this was. According to legend, audiences gasped when they saw Alison’s ironing board, since the tools of the working class were never part of the theatre. Many people hated the play for being uncouth and furious, but critic Kenneth Tynan called it a “minor miracle” for just these reasons. Soon enough, it inspired a wave of “angry young man” dramas.

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The actress fights her impulses in The New Group’s latest play

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Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages’ ongoing series about actors and how they create their roles
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She’s a character you want to shake some sense into. As she moves through Russian Transport, Erika Sheffer’s world premiere play at the New Group, Diana behaves like someone who’s in control of her life and her family. A Russian immigrant who helps her husband run a car service, she’s gruffly charming as she barrels over everything, insisting that it’s Chinese food for dinner and threatening to kill her children if they don’t sit down right now.

Still, Diana can’t see that her family’s imploding. Her brother Boris, fresh off the boat from Russia, arrives with dark plans for his time in America. He changes everyone’s lives, and even though Diana’s partially aware of what he’s doing, she misses the most important details.

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A theatre makes an asset of its unusual space

Actors have clambered up it. Paintings have hung on it, as have flags and bunting. It has been a fence post, a ship mast, a tiny house and (on numerous occasions) a tree. No matter what it is, though, the pillar looming in the downstage right corner of the Irish Repertory Theatre’s stage is always the elephant in the room.

“It’s an old friend by this point,” says artistic director Charlotte Moore, who has wrangled with the pillar on dozens of occasions. “When you design for this space, that’s where you have to start.”
Luckily, she and her producing director, Ciarán O’Reilly, use the same designers repeatedly, among them James Morgan, Tony Walton and Klara Zieglerova.

A pillar in the far corner would attract little notice in most theatres, but the odd configuration at Irish Rep’s cozy Chelsea venue draws attention. At stage right, where actors typically can exit into the wings, there’s a small side pocket of additional seating. These 40 seats—”the jury box,” Moore calls them— make the pillar seem to be dead center in the stage.

She and her set designer, Antje Ellermann, have gone the tried-and-true route of turning the pillar into a tree for their acclaimed revival of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, which closes Jan. 29. “We often set up ladders next to it,” Moore says, “and this time we have Gerry Evans, the ne’er-do-well in the play, climb up it at one point.”

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Inside the acrobatic magic of the award-winning show

Even if it delivered nothing but acrobatics, Leo would be a striking piece of theatre. The show, which won the Best of Edinburgh Award at the Edinburgh Fringe and is now being presented at Theatre Row, exists to make our jaws drop, to make us question our own eyes.

The “tricks” are even more alluring because we see exactly how they’re done. On the right side of the stage, we find Leo (played by German acrobat Tobias Wegner) standing in a colorful room with nothing but a suitcase.  Lounging around, he lies on the floor and puts his feet on a bright red wall. Later, he balances on one leg and slowly bends down to touch the floor with one hand, letting his other arm and leg jut into the air. By the time the show’s over, he’s contorted himself into all sorts of exotic shapes.

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How Kate Skarpetowska created striking dances of her own

Buoyant, vivid movement; sensual partnering; and relatable themes have made Parsons Dance a New York staple since 1985. With his stable of sexy, muscular dancers, founder David Parsons has crafted 50 trademark works, often including of-the-moment elements like contemporary rock music. Through January 22nd at the Joyce Theater, audiences can catch both Parsons’ work (including the premiere of his Round My World), as well as the choreography of a former company member, Kate Skarpetowska. “To be able to produce young artists is a complete joy,” Parsons says. “For me, it’s a part of dance.”

In the haunting and aptly titled A Stray’s Lullably (pictured above), Skarpetowska explores the world of the underdog. As car horns and street noise drift in and out, four dancers torque and twist in rounded phrases, hands reaching out and eyes focused down. They move in unison and then writhe separately, melting into hunched positions in slow motion as if floating in sea water. The two solos and duet tell the stories of four downtrodden pedestrians, each with yearning gestures and space-gobbling phrases.

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