Posts Tagged ‘Michael Hunter’

Audrey Dundee Hannah and Jack Halton explore the Old Mint.

I received a note from actor-director Florentina Mocanu-Schendel a week or so ago, inviting me to the Collected Work’s new production of Jean Genet‘s The Balcony. It promises to be an unusual production. Here’s one reason why: it’s performed at the gloomy Old Mint in San Francisco – also known as the City’s “Granite Lady,” with its dark stone corridors and vaults. You can see at the two bottom photos exactly what I  mean, if the other photos don’t give you a feel for the place. (All photos, by the way, taken by Jamie Lyons, who co-directs the play with Michael Hunter.) The Granite Lady is a survivor, the only financial institution open for business after the 1906 earthquake. They thought it was an apt setting for a play about the struggle for institutional power.

San Francisco’s cheery landmark.

The Balcony is about a revolutionary uprising in the streets of an unnamed city. While armed rebels fight to take control of the city’s power structures, most of the action takes place in a brothel or “house of illusions,” where clients act out their fantasies of institutional power: they play judges, biships, and generals as their counterparts in the “real” world struggle to maintain their authority.

Important voices had lots to say about the controversial classic: Genet’s biographer, the critic Edmund White, wrote that, with the foregrounding of illusion and meta-theatricality i creating contemporary power and desire, Genet invented modern theater.  The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan described the play as the rebirth of the spirit of Aristophanes, while the philosopher Lucien Goldmann called it “the first great Brechtian play in French literature.” Martin Esslin has called The Balcony “one of the masterpieces of our time.”

Collected Works was founded in 2012 by a a group of theater directors, actors, and designers, mostly from the PhD program in drama at Stanford, where they had worked under the enlightened guidance of Carl Weber, who in turn had been the assistant director to Bertolt Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble. The San Francisco Weekly said the group is “hell-bent on bringing exceptional, experimental performance to the West Coast theater scene” – and in offbeat venues, too. Go here for more information.

We’ve written about Collected Works before, here, for it’s earlier production of Gombrowicz’s Princess Ivona. This one definitely sounds like it’s worth checking out. Go here for times and tickets.

Right to left: Ryan Tacata (facing the wall) Scott Baker, Val Sinckler, and Florentina herself. (Photo: Jamie Lyons)

Ryan Tacata has a nightcap, with Valerie Fachman.

Val Sinckler ponders the script.

Ryan Tacata finds a lot to ponder, too.

Michael Hunter (right) and the Franconia Performance Series, 2012 (Photo: James Lyons)

The last time we ran across Michael Hunter, he was chumming around Stanford with Mario Biagini, the associate director of Workcenter, a theatrical endeavor based on the principles of 20th-century theater pioneer Jerzy Grotowski.  Michael has been busy since then.  He has recently established a theater company in San Francisco, The Collected Works, with four other graduates of the Stanford doctoral program in drama.  One of them is Florentina Mocanu-Schendel – we’ve written about her, too, here.

Gombrowicz in Vence, 1965. (Photo: B. Paczowski)

This weekend, they’re taking on Witold Gombrowicz‘s Princess Ilona in San Francisco. The great Polish writer is known mostly for Ferdydurke, Pornografia, and his Diary.

Princess Ilona was  first published in the literary journal Skamander in 1938, and first performed in 1957 at the Teatr Dramatyczny in Warsaw, when the Communist government in Poland briefly lifted a ban on Gombrowicz’s work.  After that, his work vanished from Poland until the 1970s (and was not published until the 1980s).

He’s not as well known, at least in the U.S., for his drama – so this Bay Area premiere will be a rare treat indeed. The  first performance begins on Thursday, Jan. 24 and continues through February 9 at San Francisco’s Performance Art Institute. Buy tickets here.

But wait!  It gets better!  Lillian Vallee, Swarthmore’s Allen Kuharski, author Erik Butler, Michael Hunter and Stanford’s Branislav Jakokljevic will have a panel discussion at 1 p.m. on Friday, January 25, in Piggott Theatre, Memorial Auditorium.  “We’ll be discussing Gombrowicz’s legacy, his Diary, and my production in San Francisco,” Michael wrote me in an email.

Lillian is mostly known to me as one of the fine team of Czeslaw Milosz translators; I got to know her when she contributed to An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz, and we later met face to face at a Milosz centennial celebration at the Nobel poet’s home in Berkeley.  She’s just published a new edition of Gombrowicz’s  Diary with Yale University Press.

Director Michael Hunter

The deadlines are swift and terrible this week, so I’ll pinch a short description of the play from the company’s press release:

Princess Ivona (or Ivona, Princess of Burgundia) is the first, and most internationally performed, of the plays of Witold Gombrowicz, the influential Polish novelist, playwright, and diarist, whom John Updike has called “one of the profoundest of the late moderns” and Milan Kundera “one of the great novelists of our century.” Widely performed and celebrated throughout Europe and on the East Coast, Gombrowicz’s timeless and wickedly funny allegory is finally being introduced to Bay Area audiences, by a brand-new company of gifted and experienced theatre makers, in the exciting new warehouse space of the Performance Art Institute.

The play follows the bizarre intrigues of a self-confident Royal Court, whose members enjoy an unchallenged sense of privilege, luxury, and control – over both themselves and others.  The presence of a strange, awkward, silent young woman who mysteriously wanders into their world soon throws the court into a tailspin – the King and Queen begin to unravel at the core of their being, and the rational functioning of the court’s administrators becomes increasingly lunatic.  As the play spirals towards its astonishing ending, both the story and Gombrowicz’s inventive language become more outlandish and theatrical.

Florentina

The company calls the play a “well-built and versatile machine,” quoting Gombrowicz: “A writer can, if he wishes, describe reality as he sees it or as he imagines it to be; this produces realistic works (…) But he can also apply a different method in which reality is reduced to its component parts, after which these parts are used like bricks to construct a new edifice, a new world or microcosm, which ought to be different from the regular world and yet correspond with it in some way … different but, as the physicists say, adequate.”

I like this shorter Gombrowicz injunction, from the Collected Works website: “Review your platitudes.”

Lillian and Kuharski will hold a “talkback” after the Friday night performance in San Francisco.  Who knows?  You might even find me there.  It all depends on me clearing a few deadlines first…