The theatre is a paradoxical place to go in search of empathy. While the actors are up there, working to make us feel, through their acute particularity, what it is to be human, we are down here, elbow to elbow with fidgeting, gum-chewing, symphonically coughing specimens of our own kind. The divide can seem vast—one ringing phone can be enough to make you want to cancel everybody, everywhere—and theatre-makers try to bridge it in all sorts of ways. They deconstruct the stage and break the famous fourth wall, enlisting audience members to participate in the action, to varying degrees of success. (I’m thinking of the radically confrontational ending of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s recent “Fairview”—and also, with pity, of the outraged theatregoer, I saw complaining to an usher at Jeremy O. Harris’s “Daddy,” after one of that production’s numerous displays of simulated swimming-pool coitus left her soaked.) Or they may simply let the story lead, and trust in the power of performance to guide us.
Jonathan Kent’s restrained staging of “The Height of the Storm,” by the French playwright Florian Zeller (a Manhattan Theatre Club production that has arrived at the Samuel J. Friedman after a heralded run in London), is as traditional as they come. The action is set in a grand, slightly shabby home in a suburb of Paris; the house lights are kept down, the audience members stowed safely in their seats, asked only to watch and listen. It is the play itself that lurches and rocks us, addling our expectation of narrative coherence in order to take us inside the sort of experience that can’t be grasped with the mind alone.
この記事は The New Yorker の October 7, 2019 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は The New Yorker の October 7, 2019 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、8,500 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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STUNTED
\"The Fall Guy.\"
MOTHERS OF US ALL
Paula Vogel's \"Mother Play,\" Shaina Taub's \"Suffs,\" and Amy Herzog's \"Mary Jane.\"
PURE PLEASURE
The \"Radical Optimism\" of Dua Lipa.
PARADISE LOST
The search for a home that never was in Claire Messud's new novel.
ORIGIN STORY
What do we hope to learn from our prehistory?
DEATH IN VENICE
At the Biennale, the past dignifies the weird, desperate present.
WE'RE NOT SO DIFFERENT, YOU AND I
\"You'll never get away with this!\" Ultra Man vowed as he wriggled in his chains. \"You may destroy me, but you'll never destroy what I stand for!\"
STONES OF CONTENTION
The British Museum faces accusations of cultural theft-and actual theft.
A CAMPUS IN CRISIS
Dissent and defiance at Columbia's pro-Palestine protests.
ARROW RETRIEVER
I am an arrow retriever. After a batrows are costly and time-consuming to make. It seems like a terrible waste-and maybe even a sin―for an arrow to fall to the ground without hitting someone. Even if the arrow kills somebody, it can be reused to kill someone else. As Randolf the Scot famously said, \"Arrows don't grow on trees.\"