Posts from — February 2012

Choreographer Jody Oberfelder follows the heart

When it comes to art and music, nothing is more cliché than “matters of the heart.” So when choreographer Jody Oberfelder began work on THROB, a new piece about the vital organ, she knew she had to be innovative. Fascinated by both science and emotion, Oberfelder read textbooks, interviewed cardiologists, and looked deeply into her own visceral experience. “I want to be sure it’s not a Hallmark card,” she explains. “I’m going more for the endurance and heroics of life itself.”

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The actor gets “Happy” in Broadway’s Death of a Salesman

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Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages‘ ongoing series about actors and how they create their roles

Every night, before the audience arrives at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre for Death of a Salesman, Finn Wittrock spends time on the set walking around his “own house.”

The house is based on Jo Mielziner’s set design for the original 1949 production of Arthur Miller’s classic play, which follows the tragic final days of salesman Willy Loman (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Wittrock, who plays Willy’s son Happy, says the history of the set helps him prepare for the harrowing show.

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The actor co-writes and stars in a bold interpretation of Homer

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You could argue that any performance is a translation—a transference of words on a page to the living dimensions of the stage—but the thought’s especially tantalizing in An Iliad. Both the script and the cast remind us there’s no “definitive” version of a story: There are only new interpretations to capture the imagination.

Script first: Now in previews at New York Theatre Workshop, the one-man show is an adaptation of Robert Fagles’ translation of Homer’s Iliad.

Right away, then, this ancient tale of the Trojan War is covered in fingerprints, each adding a new perspective to the story.

And the stew gets richer in the Workshop’s production. An Iliad is co-written by director Lisa Peterson and actor Denis O’Hare (pictured above, right, with Stephen Spinella.) In their version, a storyteller comes on stage and spills out portions of the poem. Every few minutes, though, he interrupts himself, telling us what it was like to see Greek warriors up close or mourning the wars he’s had to witness. We hear about Achilles, Hector, and the gods, but we also learn about the man who describes them.

“Lisa and I talked a lot about who he is and what he is, and it’s a slippery thing,” says O’Hare (True Blood, American Horror Story, Broadway’s Take Me Out.) “One of the best things we came up with was he’s a ‘living book’ sitting on the shelf, and either he’s being pulled down off the shelf by willing participants or he’s willing himself off the shelf to fall open in a time when the culture needs him.”

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The Tony Award winner moves into “Hurt Village”

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Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages’ ongoing series about actors and how they create their roles

Tonya Pinkins believes in Hurt Village.

In Katori Hall’s latest play, now in previews at the Signature Theatre’s new complex, the actress stars as Big Mama, the weary matriarch of a Memphis housing project where drugs, violence, and poverty are coiled around everyone’s throat. Even in this nightmare, however, there are flickers of hope: Big Mama’s talented great-granddaughter is threatening to flourish. Her grandson has just come back from the Iraq War. And there’s a chance the government will help her family move to a better part of town. When trouble comes, Big Mama clings to these silver linings, and her effort gives the production a furious energy.

For Pinkins, Big Mama feels authentic. “There’s a rawness to [Katori's] work that I would say allows you to bring all your truth to it,” she says.

And that’s not the case with every production: “I did another play, and it was also a black play, and I didn’t find anything about the people to be real. I didn’t know any black people like them. It was an awkward sort of thing to be portraying black people who didn’t feel authentic. But with Katori’s stuff, it’s so raw that the comments I’ve gotten from friends are that it [shows] a part of life that they want to forget, that they don’t want to look at.”

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