"Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it" – Bertolt Brecht
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A profoundly despondent fellow wanders into an amusement park for distraction from his agony. Inside, he slips into a fantasia of scenes – including his own romance with a young woman from the Midwest, igniting a bundle of neuroses that keeps them estranged…
The second in Beaumarchais’ trilogy of Figaro plays – between “The Barber of Seville” and “The Guilty Mother” – “Marriage” savages class inequities (Louis XVI understandably banned it). Echoing Mozart librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, director Michel and designer Duncombe knowingly use the lunatic convolutions of farce to strike more profound cultural targets.
A high level of invention suffuses “The Trojan Women” at City Garage. Deconstructing Euripides’ classic tragedy into a multifarious current-day collage, adaptor-designer Charles Duncombe and director Frederíque Michel pull few punches in the wake of burning Illium.
Eugène Ionesco’s script, translated by Donald Allen—did we catch a fleeting reference to the Internet?—is a magnificent gift to actors and to the audience.
The central character in Molière’s comedy, here translated and adapted by Frédérique Michel & Charles Duncombe could be and often is a punching bag. But not here.
With a generous soupçon of witty anarchy, “The Bourgeois Gentilhomme” tumbles into Santa Monica. This sleek City Garage take on Molière’s deathless satire of nouveau riche pretensions and aristocratic machinations is nominally avant-garde, mainly an unguarded hoot.
“A bad penny always turns up” is a platitude that packs an unexpected existential punch, at least in the sardonic world of New York playwright Mac Wellman. In Wellman’s Obie Award-winning short play, the titular “Bad Penny” opens a portal to the metaphysical abyss that yawns beneath the banality of a summer’s day in Central Park — and, by extension, beneath a society shaped by clichéd thought.
Charles Duncombe’s adaptation of Heiner Müller’s text The Mission, which Duncombe retitled The Mission (Accomplished), takes Müller’s saga of three French insurgents in 1798 who tried to instigate a slave rebellion in British-ruled Jamaica, then juxtaposes that poem about regime change gone awry with images of a ruminative George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and an American soldier in Iraq.
Eugene Ionesco’s brilliant absurdist farce unfolds in a universe dislodged from logic and even common sense. Yet, even in this bizarre world, a good laugh is still a good laugh, thanks to director Frederique Michel’s assured staging that comes marbled in cool irony.
Frédérique Michel’s deft direction and outstanding performances by Troy Dunn and Sharon Gardner create a vivid, evocative production of German playwright Heiner Müller’s free adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses.