"Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it" – Bertolt Brecht
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Frederique Michel’s elegantly presented adaptation of Simone de Beauvoir’s novella meshes poetry, surreal onstage imagery, and dream-like movement to create a complicated but nuanced portrait of a borderline delusional soul.
KATZELMACHER is the German slang for “cat screwer,” which actually refers to somebody with an unbridled sex drive. In the case of Jorgos, in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s very first (1968) play, the label is a misnomer, an ethnic slur applied to this Greek (“foreign”) laborer in a provincial German town.
City Garage’s latest offering shows director Frederique Michel as a skillful multimedia storyteller, blending narrative, film and performance art in seven pieces. All explore love, loss and alienation, with the text for all but one originating from a book of stories by Michel’s longtime collaborator, Charles A. Duncombe Jr.
There are two ways to view “Titus Tartar” at City Garage. You can keep your brain on high alert, striving to catch every nuance of Albert Ostermaier’s fascinating take on Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus.” Or you can fall asleep. Passive observation is not an option.
A play based on four Aimee Bender stories bursts with primordial passions.
The challenge of impenetrability hasn’t intimidated Aresis Ensemble’s Frederique Michel from tackling “The Gertrude Stein Project” at Santa Monica’s City Garage. Honoring what she calls Stein’s “Cubist” approach to theater, Michel has assembled passages from Stein’s writings into a fragmented, kaleidoscopic presentation.
… Beckett-like lyricism comes on the heels of a brutal portrait of the 18th-century tyrant and militarist Frederick the Great, whose soft spot for high culture, including Lessing’s plays, was beaten out of him by his savage father, Frederick-Wilhelm.
Normand Chaurette’s The Queens, inspired by Shakespeare’s Richard III, is a fantasy drama that depicts a classic struggle for power and status. Set during the time of the War of the Roses, the play unfolds over a few crucial hours on one afternoon. The king, Edward, lies dying off-stage and the women of the court are jockeying for position.
Compelling and sad, the otherworldly presence in Caryl Churchill’s play preys on earthbound humans with a vengeance.
Towards the close of Charles Duncombe’s harrowing ensemble piece about human-rights abuses by Russian soldiers in Chechnya, a young man asks incredulously, “It’s not really possible for people to act like that, is it?” The answer is self-evident but far from simple, and rooted in paradox.