Rage Against the Machine
by Molly Grogan

Sellars and STAN

When opera’s spiky-haired California radical and a Belgian company intrigued by the Black Panthers take the stage during the same month, you can be sure that a volatile mix of art and politics will be in the spotlight.
Sure enough, the LA-based director Peter Sellars serves up a multimedia display of unabashed political correctness, using Stravinsky’s 1917 composition “The Story of A Soldier” to tackle the subject of US-Mexico border relations. Transposed to southern California’s ethnic salad bowl and set during the Kosovo war, this newly polemical tale of a soldier who returns home from war to find the Devil waiting for him draws a disturbing parallel between America’s treatment of Hispanic immigrants and Serbia’s butchery of the Kosovars.
With his latest show, the controversial Sellars writes another chapter in what he calls his “life work” of art as activism, a program of reinterpreting opera classics that divides audiences into those who praise a genius and others who boo a punky upstart. It’s a vision that the director promotes on stage as well as off.
Sellars has found a sympathetic ear at MC93 Bobigny, where he appears for the eighth time since 1987’s “Nixon in China,” the show that set him squarely in the opera establishment’s sights. For “Soldier,” the Portorican poet Gloria Enedina Alvarez wrote the bilingual libretto, while the Norwegian chamber orchestra Avanti! interprets the eclectic score under the direction of Grant Gershon.
But where Sellars’ creates mega-shows to make his point, the young Flemish company Tg STAN explores themes of political corruption, social hypocrisy and failed ideals by refusing such conventions of theater as direction, sets and character. Company co-founder Frank Vercruyssen explained that STAN works instead to generate a real-time experience of actors acting. In so doing, they offer audiences the excitement of witnessing first-hand a show’s inspirational stops and starts while developing an acting style of Brechtian emotional distance.
Invited by the Festival d’Automne, the multilingual STAN brings three shows in all (two in English). “JDX Un ennemi du peuple” uses rap’s rhythms and acerbic wit to tell Ibsen’s story of one man’s fight against demagoguery and hypocrisy, in a show conceived as a reaction to the rise of the far right in Antwerp. Similarly, “Point Blank” puts a modern spin on Chekhov’s early novel “Platonov” by looking at its central theme of disillusionment through the optic of a Michael Frayn adaptation of the same.
Finally, “Quartett” explores the complementary energies of dance and theater via Heiner Müller’s 1980 meditation on terrorism, inspired by “Les Liaisons dangereuses” STAN’s political consciousness, extending even to American topics like Panther leader George Jackson, the subject of the 1996 show “One 2 Life,” is complemented by their unconventional work-in-progress style. The company “rehearses” by painstakingly deconstructing the text, waiting to physically define the show live on stage. There, except for delivering lines, no limitations are placed on what an actor may do. The result is a cast trained to expect the unexpected and an intense state of dramatic tension.
From Sellars to STAN, art and politics are a provocative recipe for free-thinking, straight-talking theater this month.
“The Story of A Soldier,” Nov 3-12, Tue-Sat, 8:30pm, Sun, 3:30pm (Nov 11, 4 :30pm & 8:30pm), MC93 Bobigny, 1 bd Lénin, Bobigny, M° Bobigny-Pablo Picasso, 65-140F, tel: 01 41 60 72 72. “JDX Un ennemi du peuple,” Nov 10-18, “Point Blank,” Nov 27 to Dec 3, Mon-Tue, Thu-Sat, 8:30pm, Sun, 5:30pm, Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, 21 bd Jourdan, 14e, RER Cité Universitaire, 110F/80F (55F Mon), tel: 01 43 13 50 50, “Quartett,” Nov 20-25, Mon, Wed-Sat, 8:30pm, Centre Pompidou, pl Georges Pompidou, 4e, M° Hôtel de Ville/Rambuteau, 90F/60F, tel : 01 44 78 12 33

Theater Choice

“Ubu”
English director Dan Jemmet brings to Bobigny “Ubu Kunst,” a trash update of Jarry’s satiric tale of despotic greed, told here with puppets, a sideshow-like set, kitchen utensils filling in for most of the cast and “some of the most irrepressibly inventive swearing ever spoken on stage.” The show’s 1998 London run posed the question of whether Jarry's well-worn 1896 play can still shock (it can, in this thoroughly irreverent version). The question now is whether that show’s success, driven by outlandish word-play and the inimitable presence of Luis Alberto Soto as Pa Ubu, can be matched in this French translation.
Nov 22 to Dec 22, Mon-Tue, Fri-Sat, 8pm, Thu, 7pm, Sun, 5pm, Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, 21 bd Jourdan, 14e, RER Cité Universitaire, 100F/80F (all 55F Mon), tel: 01 43 13 50 50

“Le Malin Plaisir”
David Hare’s “The Secret Rapture,” the story of a woman’s inevitably short-lived attempt to live freely and humanly in Thatcherite England, finds its way to French shores, only to be KO’d by Jacques Lasalle’s heavy-handed direction. The cast gives generally solid performances, however: Elsa Zilberstein is particularly watchable, playing the manipulative young widow to Béatrice Agenin’s icy Tory minister and Sabine Haudepin’s self-effacing idealist.
Tue-Sat, 9pm, Sat-Sun, 3:30pm, Théâtre de l'Atelier, 1 pl Charles Dullin, 18e, M°Anvers/Pigalle, 50-250F, tel: 01 46 06 49 24