Category — Drama

The Unusual Staging of Mike Bartlett’s “Bull”

The title of Bull, Mike Bartlett’s latest play, has a double meaning.

On one level, it’s shorthand for “bullying,” which is the central motif of a story about adults behaving like children in the workplace. Now playing at 59E59 as part of the Brits Off Broadway Festival, the show follows Thomas, an office worker who becomes an unwitting victim of his colleagues’ nasty, belittling games as they wait for their enigmatic boss to terminate an employee.

However, Bull also refers to the play’s setup, which finds the audience on either side of (and in some cases, standing around) a bullring. It’s the perfect habitat for these animalistic characters. (Bartlett delivered a similar metaphor with last year’s drama Cock, which placed the characters in a cockfighting arena.)

The seeds of Bull were planted while the playwright was on vacation. “I was in Mexico City, and I went to a bull fight,” he explains. “It was a thrilling, shocking, and completely unique event, and it made me wonder what the equivalent play would be. Immediately I thought of bullying in the workplace, which I’ve seen and encountered.”

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600 Highwaymen Find Actors in Unconventional Places

Welcome to Borough Play, our exclusive series on theatre in Brooklyn, Queens, and beyond

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When they’re looking for actors, Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, the couple and co-artistic directors behind the Brooklyn-based theatre company 600 Highwaymen, travel far beyond a typical audition room. They see potential actors everywhere.

For four years, the duo has blended amateurs with professional actors to perform in such formally inventive shows as This Time Tomorrow, which unfolded in a church basement and relied on improvisation and charades; Empire City, a piece based on a recorded interview between an aging couple in which actors traded characters; and This Great Country, an adaptation of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman which took place in a 4,000 square foot bingo parlor.

For Everyone Was Chanting Your Name, which runs at Abrons Arts Center May 9-19, Browde and Silverstone have assembled a cast of eight people spanning six decades.

Asked how his company finds its actors, Silverstone says, “We approach people on the street, ask for recommendations from friends, and use Craigslist. We’ve cast former co-workers from day jobs. We’re using the community to cast, but our process isn’t exactly democratic or therapeutic.”

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Tina Packer navigates “Women of Will”

Shakespeare’s had a grip on Tina Packer for her entire career. Decades ago, when she auditioned for England’s Royal Shakespeare Company, she used one of Queen Margaret’s speeches from Henry IV, Part III. Now she’s performing that speech again in Women of Will, her comprehensive look at the women in Shakespeare’s canon.

“I love doing [that speech] because of the range of emotion,” explains the 74-year-old actress/playwright/director/Shakespeare scholar. “Even though she’s taunting [the Duke of York] and being vicious, the truth of it is [that] that man should have been her husband, and she knows it.”

Women of Will, which plays through May 26 at the Gym at Judson, is equal parts lecture, Shakespeare revue, and master class. There are two version of the show: a two and a half-hour “overview” and an eight-hour, five-part marathon. During the overview, Packer plays 10 women, and on alternate weekends, she undertakes the marathon, playing 25 women and four men.

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Inside the subtle choreography of Broadway’s “The Nance”

It’s an incredibly sensual wedding. In a shimmering white gown, a bride drapes across her husband, who’s resplendent in a top hat and tails. We can just see their profiles as they caress: His arm slides up hers, her leg quivers with anticipation, and the music matches the erotic energy of their dance.

Then we realize this couple isn’t a couple at all. The seduction features just one performer, dressed on one side like a bride and on the other like a groom. The dance is a ruse to make us think one person is two.

And the story goes deeper. The wedding number is an interlude in The Nance, the new drama from Douglas Carter Beane that’s now on Broadway at the Lyceum. The play follows Chauncey Miles, a vaudeville performer in 1937 New York who makes his living playing “nances,” or effeminate parodies of gay men.

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In “Furry,” Times Square peddlers wage the ultimate battle

Welcome to Borough Play, our exclusive series on theatre in Brooklyn, Queens, and beyond

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Visiting Times Square is one thing. While tourists delight in its chaos, gawking at the bright lights and characters like the Naked Cowboy, locals tend to avoid the place at all costs

Working in Times Square is another matter. For playwright William Burke, an accumulation of ushering jobs and a stint doing crowd control for The Grinch Who Stole Christmas led him to observe, “It’s very intense to stand still in Times Square with everything moving about you. You see the remnants of things left behind and a huge wet blanket of commercialism that’s being dropped on everyone.”

However, Burke wasn’t inspired to start writing about the area until he came across an article in the New York Post about a man in a Cookie Monster costume who stabbed another Cookie Monster in a turf war.

The feud was part of the growing (and slightly odious) Times Square subculture of street peddlers who dress like famous children’s characters. Roaming the pavement in kid-friendly costumes, they wave furiously at tourists, trying to get tips. It’s an unregulated industry, which can create unsettling consequences.

Burke explores this world in Furry, a play about a man in an Elmo suit. (It runs at JACK, the Brooklyn performance space, from April 18-27.)

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