Fall New York Theatre Tour IV

Off to a Saturday Matinee downtown at New York Theatre Workshop, where I saw Dutch avant garde director Ivo von Hove's production of Moliere's The Misanthrope.

To say it was unusual would be an understatement. The play takes place on a stark, monochrome set surrounded by plexiglass walls, with a huge video screen in back. On the other side of the plexi, all around the perimeter, there are video cameras and operators. This allows the action to take place with no sense of the proscenium nature of the theatre. Characters can be facing upstage away from the audience during a scene, but the camera is able to give us a closeup of their faces. Everyone is dressed in modern black and white business-type clothing, and entrances and exits are made through a door that is flush and essentially concealed, or a garage door that is flung open from time to time for effect. The cameras follow characters offstage into dressing rooms, where they sit at makeup mirrors and continue the action of the play. There are times when there is no one on the stage as the video screen lets us into the world of offstage.

Early in the play, several characters bring a picnic dinner, which they spread out over a stark gray table. As dinner progresses, the main character, the "misanthrope," in a rant about the need for truth, throws himself on the table and covers his body with the food. Chocolate sauce, ketchup, whipped cream, watermelon, jam - everything imaginable, covers him from head to toe.

Later in the play, pursuing his love, a socialite who operates in a world where truth is not helpful, he chases her off the stage up the aisle, and out into the street, where she tries to hail a cab, and collapses into a near-fetal position as the misanthrope continues to rant. All of this is visible to us, because the video crew follows them outside, and the drama unfolds on the video screen. Passers-by stop and look incredulously at what is happening. One offers, "I won't let him hurt you." She makes her way back into the theatre, while the main character, still in a rage, picks up two large bags of trash from the sidewalk(obviously a plant), brings them back down the aisle to the stage, and dumps them all over the floor. He then dives into the garbage, rolls around in it and rubs it all over himself.

By this point, I have totally forgotten Moliere.

I enjoyed the afternoon, but felt more like I was back in the late '60's, when this type of deconstruction was fun.

Throughout the play, I kept thinking of Laurence Olivier, who, while watching Dustin Hoffman go through all of the method acting preparation for his role in "Marathon Man," which included sleep deprivation, complex and annoying warm ups, asked, "Can't you just act?"