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SLEDGEHAMMERTHEATRE,
OCT-NOV, 2002
Rob Hopper
In one of the finest dramatic productions of the year, this
brilliantly written, acted, and directed show focuses on the
oft-ignored victims of senseless murder: the parents
of themurderer. Director Kirsten Brandt's vision
of Susan Yankowitz's magnificent script nails the emotions
that Yankowitz was so adept in creating. The audience seemed
to hold its collective breath when (the mother) ultimately
does face her son, finally confronting both him and herself
in a desperate search for understanding.
--San Diego Playbill
Pat
Launer KPBS-FM
NPR
THEATRE REVIEW:
"A KNIFE IN THE HEART" by SUSAN YANKOWITZ
at Sledgehammer Theatre
Airdate: November 8, 2002
(In) her trenchant, brutal play, Susan Yankowitz reveals
the many colors of pain and the ripple effect of violence
-- on friends and family of the perpetrators. In a time-shifting
sequence of snapshots, she assembles a collage of images,
the portrait of a culture that has spawned youths without
moral core or conscience. We watch in horror as the
parents of 25 year-old Donald Holt try to sort it all out.
In the end, we as a society are left with the same
questions these parents ask ove rand over: Who are we and
what have we wrought? This Sledgehammer Theatre production
is a magnificent marriage of substance, style and form,
melding Yankowitz's scorching scenes and dialogue, Kirsten
Brandt's stark, sizzling direction, Paul Peterson's vivid
sound and David LeeCuthbert's breathtaking, lighting which,
like the play itself, both illuminatesand obscures. Every
piece of theater should be like this 'Knife in the Heart'--
a brilliant collaborative effort that forces us to examine
who and what we are.
--Pat Launer, KPBS-FM, NPR
THEATRE REVIEW: “A KNIFE IN THE HEART”
At the Sledgehammer Theatre
KPBS Airdate: November 08, 2002
Emotional intensity slices through the air with short, sharp
strokes. The silence is palpable. Onstage, in a series of
brief scenes, we witness horror, anguish, grief, despair.
The pain of parents raising a child. They try to love him,
nurture him, understand him. And then, one unforgettable
day, their lives become a wreckage, when they learn that
their sweet, silent, violin-playing son is really a monster.
He dispassionately murdered three people, one of them the
governor of the state, slashing his way to notoriety. Trying
to be significant, noticed, televised. "A Knife in
the Heart" was inspired by the rash of killings and
crimes committed by troubled but impassive young men who
show no empathy, no remorse. In the West coast premiere
of her trenchant, brutal play, Susan Yankowitz reveals the
many colors of pain and the ripple effect of violence --
on friends and family of the perpetrators. Yankowitz, a
veteran of the renowned Open Theatre, worked experimentally
with legendary theatermaker Joseph Chaikin. Here, in a time-shifting
sequence of snapshots, she assembles a collage of images,
the portrait of a culture that has spawned youths without
moral core or conscience. We watch in horror as the parents
of 25 year-old Donald Holt try to sort it all out. Where
and why did it all go wrong?
In our society, the biggest burden, for child-care and ultimate
responsibility, falls on the mother, whose "every breath"
in this play "is like a knife in the heart." We
witness psychiatric and legal interrogations, parental anger
and mutual disgust, courtroom pleas and verdicts, and, along
with the youth who seems to move through it all, serene
and detached, we meet a young girl who's turned on by his
swashbuckling acts, willing to risk all to see him and love
him. Something is very very wrong, and neither shrinks nor
parents nor playwrights have the answer. In the end, we
as a society are left with the same questions these parents
ask over and over: Who are we and what have we wrought?
This Sledgehammer Theatre production is a magnificent marriage
of substance, style and form, melding Yankowitz's scorching
scenes and dialogue, Kirsten Brandt's stark, sizzling direction,
Paul Peterson's vivid sound and David Lee Cuthbert's breathtaking,
lighting which, like the play itself, both illuminates and
obscures. The ensemble is outstanding, with knockout performances
by David Stanbra as young Donald, Laura Lee Juliano as the
girl who adores him, William Todd Tressler as the hapless
father, and most of all, Rosina Reynolds, riveting, flawless,
gut-wrenching, pitch-perfect as the tormented mother. Every
piece of theater should be like this 'Knife in the Heart'
-- a brilliant collaborative effort that forces us to examine
who and what we are.
'Knife' cuts to the core of emotion
By Anne Marie Welsh
Beautiful is not your usual description of a Sledgehammer
show. "Raw" and "edgy" tend to be the
right adjectives, along with "original," and,
lately, "unfinished." Yet beautiful does describe
Sledge artistic director Kirsten Brandt's startling and
restrained production of "A Knife in the Heart."
Smartly cast and exquisitely lighted by David Lee Cuthbert,
with a ravishing sound score by Paul Peterson, this complex
yet fluent staging is a breakthrough for Brandt, a talented
young director at 29. She's been struggling to find or create
congenial material since she took over the artistic direction
of the theater nearly three years ago.
The subject matter of Susan Yankowitz's play jibes with
the theater company's tradition, for "Knife,"
which opened over the weekend, confronts violent murder.
Like a prism turned in the light, it reflects the causes
and consequences of a well-brought-up young man killing
a state governor and several bystanders, apparently just
to get attention.
Yankowitz's script is anything but a cultural soap opera,
however. Shrewdly, she layers in humorous scenes, and subtle
satire. It never reduces motive, nor simplifies the familial
and social fallout. In fact, we leave this production still
not believing that Donald Holt (David Stanbra), an aspiring
violinist, a so-so student, a witty sort of loner, was actually
capable of the crime. He's like most youngsters ––
and even such adults as fastidious David Westerfield ––
in the expanding gallery of killers making headlines recently.
He planned it rationally. He got something emotionally from
the act. And he left his family and friends, not to mention
the victims' families, devastated. The style of the plotless
presentation is influenced by Yankowitz's long association
with the seminal avant-garde director Joe Chaikin. Yankowitz
and Brandt fuse the actors' language and their physicality
to simple stage imagery, music and lighting with an artful
delicacy, clarity and precision of feeling.
The emphasis, however, is not on Donald, but on his mother,
played with quiet passion and numbed disbelief by Rosina
Reynolds. We see her first in a wordless posture of anguish,
and as the short scenes occur, folding in more information,
the action often lifts to these images beyond the power
of words. Instead of a linear plot, "A Knife in the
Heart" is a drama of accumulation, the picture enlarging
and completing itself over time. That's part of
this play's provocation, however. In its careful, undemanding
way, "A Knife in the Heart" makes us look squarely
at the inexplicable. It leads, as the best art
does, not to explanation or outrage, but to contemplation.
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July 14th, 2002
Where Musicals and Opera Overlap, a Hybrid Emerges
By Nahma Sandrow
THE line dividing opera and musical theater has never been
clear. But in recent timesboth forms have been expanding,
and crossovers are increasingly common. Infact, some people
deny that any distinction exists. To explore that point, theCenter
for Contemporary Opera in New York presented a ratherdaring
experiment earlier this year: the first act of an opera performed
twice:By a musical theater cast before the intermission, and
then by an opera cast. I?For the composer and librettist,
the chance to hear the two versions �
performed in concert style �
was so fruitful that they have now createda hybrid, which
they envision performed, and even cast, in a new way. Theexperiment
involved the first act of "Chéri,"
an opera based onColette's novel of the same name, with music
by Michael Dellaira and librettoby Susan Yankowitz, a playwright.
Set in thedarkly elegant demimonde of pre-World War I Paris,
the story explores thedoomed passion between an aging courtesan
named Léa and a beautiful but decadent
young man she calls Chéri. Ms. Yankowitz,
has found adventurous ways to fuse languageand sound.
In the 1970 "Terminal," which she wrote
for the directorJoseph Chaikin and the Open Theater, the actors'
hands and feet elicited musicfrom the surfaces they touched,
words dissolved into sound, and soundscommunicated emotions
and experiences outside the usual range of theatricalexpression.
She wrote a novel, "Silent Witness," and
then ascreenplay from it, set inside the mind of a deaf-mute,
and a 1991 play, "NightSky," about an aphasic
who speaks in a poetic language stripped of syntax.Also directed
by Mr. Chaikin, it was partly inspired by his own battle withaphasia.
Among her recent projects have been a gospel and blues opera
with thejazz musician Taj Mahal and, with the film composer
Elmer Bernstein, a romanticfantasy in which characters slide
from speech into song. "Music elevatesthe text,"
Ms. Yankowitz said. "It allows for the extremely
dramaticgesture that most theater these days does not accommodate."
After thecasts disbanded, the composer and librettist listened
to the tapes of bothversions, discussing what they heard.
The "Chéri" that
has emergedis an unconventionally eclectic mix of techniques
from various musical anddramatic genres: one rather comic
character will be operatic in his exaggeratedbooming, while
another will veer toward musical comedy. Response to
the experiment showed that"Chéri"
has potential as opera or as musical theater, confirming Mr.Dellaira's
long-standing dream of a "Chéri"
with opera voices in aBroadway theater and with musical theater
voices at Lincoln Center �
simultaneously. (Is that so far-fetched,when the director
Baz Luhrmann's version of "La Bohème"
is expectedto open on Broadway this December?) In fact, several
companies have expressedinterest in producing "Chéri"
�both acts this
time. And the collaborators hope to workshop the piece in
itsnew hybrid form.
To hear an excerpt from this piece, go to www.dellairamusic.com
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