Invisible
Girls Theatre Company deserves considerable praise for its ambitious staging of
Three Plays – Unveiling by Vaclav Havel, Abortive
by Caryl Churchill, and Embers by
Samuel Beckett – at TBG Theatre on West 36th Street in midtown Manhattan. The juxtaposition of Havel’s Orwellian attack
on Communist conformity, Churchill’s ruminations on a marriage crisis, and
Beckett’s expression of existential despair was not only imaginatively conceived
but, equally important, it was intelligently and creatively executed.
The
entire program is just 90 minutes long with no intermission but a lot is packed
into that brief hour-and-a-half. In Unveiling, the first of the three one
act plays, Ferdinand Vanek (Alexander Robin Kass) has been invited to the home
of his best friends, Vera (Marcela Biven) and Michael (Patrick Hamilton) where
his hosts ply him with food and drink, entertain him with a display of their
own opulence and, most importantly, try to convince him to conform to the
values and lifestyle that they deem most appropriate. (Vanek, who also appears in several of
Havel’s other works, is a thinly-disguised stand-in for Havel himself, a dissident
playwright forced to work in a brewery because his writing has been banned by
the Communist Czechoslovakian Government.)
In
Caryl Churchill’s Abortive, Roz
(Marcela Biven) and her husband, Colin (Patrick Hamilton), are grappling with
the reality of Roz’s having been raped and having chosen to have an abortion,
despite Colin’s having offered to raise the child as his own if she chose to
keep it. She’s not sure that she made
the right decision and he’s not absolutely certain that she really was
raped. It is all taking a toll on their marriage, particularly on their sex life.
Embers is a rather typical
example of Beckett’s sense of existential despair, although probably not his
best. Henry (David Carlson) seeks to
drown out the incessant sound of the sea in his head through his own continual
blathering, but to little avail (his father died in the sea and, by this time,
he is probably quite nuts, as his wife Ada (Marcela Biven) never ceases to remind
him.
The
entire Three Plays production gets
by with a minimal set, which presents no real problem in Abortive and Embers which
originally were produced as radio dramas.
It is a bit more of a problem in Unveiling,
however, where the audience is forced to simply imagine the opulence and other “stuff”
which normally would be presented on stage and which are integral to the
play. But somehow the play’s director
and its outstanding cast still make it work.
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