Stage
HOUSE/LIGHTS | Through Sun., Feb. 27
The Wooster Group brings 1998's HOUSE/LIGHTS to St. Ann's Warehouse in DUMBO, in a double celebration of their influential edge in the theater world and their 30th anniversary. The tech-extravagant, reference-laden production pits "Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights," a libretto by experimental writing's grand dame, Gertrude Stein, with Joseph Mawra's B-movie Olga's House of Shame, a film from 1964-"an era when there really was the A industry and the B industry," founding member and HOUSE/LIGHTS star Kate Valk said on the phone. "It's a softcore B&D film; the girls are being 'tortured.' One of the big struggles is with the ringleader Olga [Suzzy Roche in Wooster's production], who may be the Devil-and here it blends with Stein's Faust. The play merges around the power struggles in its different sources, and that becomes its electricity.
With advanced multi-media tactics and brash/rash updates of its source texts (a cease-and-desist order from Arthur Miller is part of Wooster's notoriety, while their version of Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape had Wooster co-founder Willem Dafoe swinging in a skeletal ship's hold on Broadway), founder/director Elizabeth LeCompte keeps HOUSE/LIGHTS on high setting. Valk calls it "very technically coordinated, with the cameras and videotapes shooting from right down in front of the stage. That produces a lot of the tension-it's really what we're dancing around."
With Stein's motile language, Wooster picked audacious material. "It's one plastic word after another, and very, very difficult to memorize," Valk said. "I'm keeping up with the track of the text in my ear, so it's literally flowing like an electric current through me. The whole play comes through my head-it's like I'm actually the writer's head. Stein hijacks the Faust dilemma, the existential dilemma, and puts it on these women [Valk is Faust and several Mawra characters]-then back on Faust. Am I here or am I there? It's about a sort of tele-present: the tvs, the live cameras-where is she, really?"
St. Ann's Warehouse in DUMBO; 38 Water St. (Bklyn. Bridge); 718-254-8779; Weds.-Sat. 8, Sun. 4; $27.
-Alan Lockwood
The Gods Are Pounding My Head! | Through Sun. April 17
A black metal contraption bellies out from the rear wall in Richard Foreman's The Gods Are Pounding My Head! A great stove? It'll slide and reveal a draped doorway; skulls clog lopped pipes, so the set may be a boiler room. The small steam engine will run its decidedly short track, and mushrooms sprout under an industrial chute, another short run the play's axe-wielding lead trio will use.
Wherever Foreman's got us ("a planet moving around the sun" comes up several times), he's aimed away from today's most blatant peril: Last year's King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe was Foreman's traipse into Bushworld. Our reigning avant-garde theater vet keys the more general malaise that's allowed political travesty; his voice-over chafes that "people were just, you know, thin somehow, just surface only." Dutch (Jay Smith, who played the daftly threatening Rufus) is its early, strapping locus in a gambit that gravitates audience sympathy amid the restless Foreman omniverse. To rest in one place; is that not to say being easier to upend? Dutch takes and retakes his breath, peering high before speaking-then hits the floorboards like a felled sequoia in Pounding's largest (but by no means last) fall.
Boon companion Frenchie (T. Ryder Smith), also in tall black boots and a knotted red kerchief, calls down to his pal to "Hang in there, Dutch." Frenchie's gaze simmers with defiant melancholy, and when Maude (Charlotta Mohlin) appears, all tensile glances that steel when she's not cutting them adrift, this expertly played caroming bout of mismatched, sidelong glimpses becomes the galvanizing "dance" on Foreman's gushing and emptying stage.
The plexi-shields are almost all down since tight, caustic 90s plays like The Mind King and Benita Canova's gritty quest, and Foreman's announced that, after decades of his manic, superbly consternating plays, he's moving to assemble a film bank. If Pounding's his swansong, its conclusion is fitting tribute: as heartening as it is based on a hopeless quaff, and as visually sumptuous as they come, while going dark, dark, dark?
Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark's Church, 131 E.10th St. (2nd Ave.); 212-533-4650; Tues., Thurs.-Sun., 8; $20/Sat. $25.
-Alan Lockwood
Prometheus
Sun. & Mon., Feb. 6 & 7
Acclaimed countertenor Derek Lee Ragin stars in the world premiere of Prometheus this week at the Guggenheim. The New York Baroque Dance Company and the Cygnus Ensemble also perform in this three-act chamber opera and ballet by composer Jonathan Dawe. The New York Baroque Dance Company is known for its innovative choreography by Catherine Turocy, who combines 18th century and modern dance techniques. Directed by Experience Bryon and produced by Works and Process.
Guggenheim Museum Peter B. Lewis Theater, 1071 5th Ave. (89th St.); 212-423-3587; 8; $20, $15 st./s.c.
-Ellen Keohane
The Last Days Of Judas Iscariot
Through sun., Mar. 13
Philip Seymour Hoffman directs Eric Bogosian and Sam Rockwell (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) in a tragicomic re-examination of the story of Judas Iscariot, the "ultimate sinner." In this anti-linear meta-limbo between Heaven and Hell, a host of diverse characters (including Pontius Pilate and Sigmund Freud) testify in the trial of "God and the Kingdom of Heaven and Earth versus Judas Iscariot."
The Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St. (betw. E. 4th St. & Astor Pl.); 212-539-8500; Tues.-Sat. 8, Sat. & Sun. at 2, Sun. at 7; $50.
-Ben Williams