By: Isa Goldberg
February 14, 2019: Off Broadway, CSC (Classic Stage Company) is performing 2 Strindberg plays in repertoire. In Dance of Death, an ageing couple, in a hateful marriage, are pitted against one another in a life and death struggle. Last seen on Broadway in 2001, with Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen, this new translation by Conor McPherson mines the contemporary spirit of Strindberg’s marriage play, its bleak pessimism, and absurdity. Written at the turn of the 20th century, Strindberg’s black comedy was well ahead of its time.
Directed here by the Tony Award winning musical actor, Victoria Clark (The Light in the Piazza), the production moves briskly, with an effecting sense of the brutality in Edgar and Alice’s 25-year marital interment. As Edgar, Richard Topol embodies the misanthropic husband who makes Alice’s every moment unbearable. And, as portrayed by Cassie Beck, the wife plays an active role in making sure their hateful marriage remains that way.
Like Dance of Death, Mies Julie delves into the notion of the survival of the fittest. In this brilliant and disturbing reimaging of Strindberg’s play, Yael Farber sets the action in 21st century South Africa, on the day of the annual Freedom Day celebration. Here, the violent romance been Mies Julie (Elise Kibler), and John (James Udom) reflect the country’s ongoing issues of race and class.
Directed by Shariffa Ali, the production is performed in the round, on a minimalist set (David L. Arsenault), leaving lots of breathing room for the raw emotional life that pervades. Here, in the most basic living quarters, intense sexual acts, rape, and murder occur, around the family dinner table. It’s a visually arresting production, opening with the ethereal figure of John’s maternal ancestor (portrayed by Vinie Burrows), wafting through the kitchen, and his mother pounding through the stones of the kitchen floor, in search of the land that had once been their own.
Visually arresting, the actors are each incredible looking, and their chemistry is explosive. Udom is a powerfully strong looking man; Patrice Johnson Chevannes as his mother is so frail she looks like the widow of all of South Africa’s fallen men, and Kibler is fetching, really an eyeful. She’s also a fabulous actor – one to watch out for. Just as dangerous in his way, Udom forces us to experience the volatility of a black man who, having been forced to suffered his fate silently, arrives at a violent end.
That director Shariffa Ali achieves both the political and psychological realities with equal force, creates this most effecting production, as chilling as it is hot!
The Dance Of Death ***1/2
Classic Stage Company
136 E. 13th St., NYC
Through March 10, 2019
Photography: Joan Marcus
Mies Julie ****
Classic Stage Company
136 E. 13th St., NYC
Through March 10, 2019
Photography: Joan Marcus
