I've decided not to renew any of my New York theater subscriptions for next season. It's just that I only ever wind up seeing the musicals, and none of the New York non-profits have been doing more than one musical a season. And I find that, even though I have tickets to see the plays, I often (well, usually) wind up blowing them off.
Why waste the money, you ask? Well, it started because I wanted to have a regular reason to get down to the city, and I figured with a subscription, I'd have four or five reasons to carve out a separate weekend in NYC. It started with the Roundabout, and then expanded to the Manhattan Theater Club and the Public Theater because they each added musicals (Romantic Poetry and Road Show, respectively) that seemed as though they were going to be hot tickets, and I wanted to make sure they didn't sell out, like the original Assassins back in the day, or the more recent revival of The Pajama Game. Well, they didn't sell out, and now I'm stuck with tickets to a bunch of plays that I don't really want to see.
Case in point: tonight I was supposed to see The American Plan at the Samuel Friedman Theater. I was originally psyched to see Mercedes Ruehl, but somehow I just couldn't justify using one of my precious show slots to see something I wasn't all that excited about. (BTW, have you noticed that they've added a beefcake shot of Kieran Campion and references to "Brokeback Mountain" to the ads for The American Plan to get the gay boys interested in seeing the show? Pretty cheap.) So, I decided to blow it off, and grabbed a discount ticket for Garden of Earthly Delights, which had really been intriguing me since I started reading about it a few months back.
Garden of Earthly Delights is a sort of dance/movement/theater/music piece devised and choreographed by Martha Clarke, a founding member of Pilobolus, a dance troupe that is a personal favorite of mine. The piece originated in 1984, and Clarke recently re-imagined and re-staged it Off-Broadway at the Minetta Lane Theater. It's inspired by the famed Hieronymus Bosch triptych of the same name, which currently resides in Museo del Prado in Madrid. Click on the image below for a more detailed view. (It's interesting to note that the dance piece came about at around the same time that Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine were creating Sunday in the Park With George, a musical based on another iconic artwork, Georges Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte." Some would call that ironic. They'd be wrong.)
The original Bosch painting may seem like something produced in a drug-induced haze -- a sort of freaky combo of Salvador Dalí and "Where's Waldo" -- but it's actually said to be a fervid expression of devout religiosity. Some art scholars consider the piece a didactic cautionary treatise from Bosch on the sins of Man, and the tortures that await the unrighteous. Others see it as lamentation of the fall of Man from the joys of Paradise.
The dance piece that Clarke has created, some 500 years later, is both brutal and sublime. It's less a literal interpretation of the painting than an exploration of its apparent themes. The work starts with amorphous figures emerging in primordial motion, then segues into iconic Biblical imagery, specifically the story of Adam and Eve. Clarke interweaves the abstract and the representational throughout, including the most literal segment featuring a virtual catalog of bodily functions (both reproductive and excretory) of a group of medieval peasants.
The piece seems most interested in all that is lusty and base, which it represents through stylized sensuality and violence, both of which are frequently disturbing. As with the painting, we're not really sure if it's meant to be a grim warning or a lament for paradise lost. Is it a celebration or a condemnation of Man's primitive urges and their expression? The piece shrewdly mixes Darwin with creationism, with the primordial ooze both the Alpha and the Omega of the piece. The question Clarke seems to be asking is, no matter what your philosophy, can Man escape his most primitive desires? Does he even want to? (Pardon the sexist terminology, but I'm using "Man" here in a deliberately archaic sense.)
The most striking production elements are Richard Peaslee's award-winning music and the "Flying by Foy." The onstage band sport the garb of medieval monks, providing music in both chanting and instrumental form, the latter via cello, various forms of percussion, bagpipes, Jew's harp, and the occasional didgeridoo. The monks alternate between being dispassionate observers and willful participants in the proceedings. As for the flying, well, it works a lot better here than it does in Billy Elliot. (I heard they were toying with cutting the flying out of Billy Elliot, which is just fine with me. I found it unbearably twee. Anyone know whether they actually have?)
Garden of Earthly Delights was originally scheduled to run until March 1st, but has recently been extended another three months to May 31st. It's definitely worth a trip down to the Village to catch it. Plus, it's only 70 minutes long, so you'll ave plenty of time after for drinks at The Duplex.
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