Undermain Theatre - In the News

Transcendence and Loss: Undermain's Black Monk
by Alexandra Bonifield / www.opednews.com

“Those who warn against ecstasy are spellbound by modern society,” declares the Black Monk in Anton Chekhov’s novella of the same name. Functioning as metaphor for the pursuit of lofty goals and transcendent imagination, the character plays catalyst for debate between validation of a mystical existence v. common sense pursuit of tangible reality. When playwright David Rabe adapted...

Theater Review: 'The Black Monk' brings out the best in the Undermain Theatre
By LAWSON TAITTE / The Dallas Morning News

Genius lies next to madness, or so many generations, especially the Romantics, believed. You've never seen the idea brought to life in such startling fashion as in The Black Monk.

Undermain Theatre opened David Rabe's adaptation of the Anton Chekhov story Friday, and it may be the most sensitive and assured production in the company's 25-year history.

Undermain Theatre launches David Rabe drama 'The Black Monk,' based on Chekhov piece
By LAWSON TAITTE / The Dallas Morning News

Turning out a new Chekhov play takes nerve: The Russian master, after all, died in 1904. David Rabe, though, has always done bold things.

The playwright, 69, launched his career with a ferocious trilogy of plays about the Vietnam War. His most famous piece, Hurlyburly, which he also helped turn into a 1998 movie, peers fearlessly into the dark world of sex and drugs in Hollywood.

Director Katherine Owens has amazingly recreated an evening of 19th century Russian-style ecstasy – in nature and in art – in Undermain Theatre’s heavy-columned basement space. A candle-lit drawing room, an exquisite violinist accompanied by a pianist and a lovely singer take us to another place and time to hear Purcell and Braga in the drawing room. And in the nether reaches of the suddenly huge theater the orchard invites the Romantic wanderer to muse on the transcendence of the spirit through union with trees and rocks. But can this Romantic-era vision of life’s purpose be trusted?

In David Rabe’s adaptation of Chekhov’s short story The Black Monk, the poetic young scholar Kovrin (Jonathan Brooks) returns from studying philosophy in Moscow to his childhood environs in the glorious Russian countryside. He is greeted warmly by his friend Tanya (Shannon Kearns-Simmons) and her father Yegor (Bruce DuBose), a kindly and determined man who has won many national awards for his grand orchards and farming techniques. Yegor took Kovrin in when his artist-mother died of tuberculosis, and hopes – not so secretly – that the young man will one day marry Tanya and take over his beloved orchard.

Thin and on edge with a sense of coming revelation, Kovrin feels joyful and exuberant in the natural surroundings. He is so at ease that he actually experiences a vision of The Black Monk (Newton Pittman), a legendary figure the young man has been researching, who supposedly returns in 1,000-year intervals to reveal a grand truth to his beholder. But what is Kovrin to make of the Black Monk’s words? And how is he to deal with a new bride who longs to live in a big city? And he must confront a father-in-law with an agenda for conferring his own life work onto the younger man’s shoulders.

Chekhov’s head always questions such visionary insights into nature and man – while his heart clearly belongs in the Romantic camp. Rabe’s dialogue is fresh and compelling, and the cast fully embodies the grand passions, tantrums, despair and spiritual longing of Chekhov’s extraordinary characters.

Brooks burns from within in his role as the poet, torn between flesh and spirit. Dubose is charming, funny, and earthy and a marginal tyrant as Tanya’s father, and Kearns-Simmons literally throws herself into the beauteous and high-strung Tanya, a woman in love with a poet more enamored of the vision he has invented himself.

The elegant set design mixing drawing room and orchard is the work of John Arnone, lit by Steve Woods. The rich and evocative period costumes are designed by Bryan Wofford. This is a show you won’t want to miss.

In memory of Lynne Alvarez
Undermain Playwright in Residence
Poet, Playwright, Friend

Poet and Playwright Lynne Alvarez Lynne Alvarez was widely admired - especially among her peers. Mac Wellman introduced us to her when she came to Dallas for treatment and asked us to do one of her plays. She said that she would like to write a new play and that play became The Snow Queen. Her book Plays by Lynne Alvarez: Later Plays and Selected Poems was just published in 2008. It made her very happy to get that finished before she got really ill. Also, the Dallas Public Library gladly accepted her archive which she assembled for them. Apart from her extraordinary insight and vitality, one really remarkable thing about Lynne was the fact that she continued to write even while her illness ravaged the speech centers in her brain. In addition to her work on The Snow Queen she advised us on all manner of literary issues and helped move the company into an entirely new understanding of dramatic literature and our role in its formation. She was our first playwright in residence. She was still advising us until a month before she died. Her loss to us is incalculable.

-Katherine Owens, Artistic Director, Undermain Theatre

Lynne Alvarez - Bio
Lynne Alvarez recently served as creative consultant for Undermain Theatre’s production of Neil Young’s Greendale and last season (0708) she wrote The Snow Queen for Undermain. She arrived in New York in 1977 planning to be a hot shot poet and die young. In the first matter - she won a CAPS grant for poetry in 1979 and served on the Poets & Writers board of directors for ten years - as Vice President of the board for four years. She did succeed in publishing much poetry, giving many readings and had two books of poetry published by Waterfront Press – the dreaming man (1981) and living with numbers (1986) and became a member of PEN. But in the second matter she continued to live and her attention turned abruptly to playwriting in 1978. Poet and Playwright Lynne Alvarez

On a whim, Alvarez accompanied a friend to a gathering of Hispanic writers at Miriam Colon’s Puerto Rican Traveling Theater. At 31 she had never thought of writing a play, but she was now hooked. She wrote two plays under the auspices of this workshop - Graciela, which was presented by the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater and The Guitarron, which premiered at the St. Clements Theatre in 1984 and won her an NEA fellowship and entry into New Dramatists. It was first published in 1985 in TCG’s anthology, On New Ground.

She was a member of New Dramatists for seven years (1979-1987) and continues to be a proud alumna of the same. There she wrote several plays including Hidden Parts (1981) which won a Kesselring Award in 1983 and premiered at Primary Stages later that year; The Wonderful Tower of Humbert Lavoignet, which won two awards – The Le Compte de Nouey Award in 1984 and an FDG/CBS Award for Best Play and later Best Production at Capital Repertory Theatre in Albany, NY in 1984/85. In 1984 The Actor’s Theatre of Louisville commissioned a one--act play which became Thin Air: Tales from a Revolution. Thin Air premiered at San Diego Repertory Theater in 1987 and won a Drama League Award and a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1988.

Two New York Foundation grants followed in 1994 and 1998, years in which she also wrote three plays for San Francisco’s ACT Conservatory-The Reincarnation of Jaimie Brown, Eddie/Mundo/Edmundo and Analiese. All three premiered there and were published variously in the Smith & Kraus anthologies Best plays by Women 1994 and Best Plays by Women 1997, and Best Plays for Young Audiences. Lincoln Center Institute commissioned Alvarez to adapt And Now Miguel (produced in its 1995 season).

The Repertory of St. Louis also commissioned two children’s plays which they produced in 1991 and 1992 - Rats, a musical based on the Pied Piper of Hamlin, and Rikki Tikki Tavi. Smith & Kraus published her Collected Plays, Vol.I in 2000.

Poet and Playwright Lynne Alvarez Alvarez was commissioned as a translator of plays and poetry as well. In 1988, she translated Fernando Arrabal’s new play The Damsel and the Gorilla or The Red Madonna for INTAR’s production. In 1990 she translated and adapted Tirso de Molina’s Don Juan of Seville for Classic Stage Company‘s New York production and most recently translated three plays of the Mexican playwright, Felipe Santander. These were published as a collection by Smith & Kraus in 2002 and were subsidized for a three-year period (1999-2002) by grants from The Peter Sharp Foundation and The Evelyn Sharp Foundation.

Alvarez also received a two-year grant (2000-2002) from the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process program to write Deux Mariages: Romola and Nijinsk, which premiered at Primary Stages in New York in May 2003 and has been published in Smith & Kraus’s anthology Best Plays by Women 2001 and as an individual play by Broadway Publishing in 2004.

In 2006, Alvarez worked on a commission for the Minneapolis Children’s Theater called Esperanza Rising. The play and the production were named the best new play and production for 2006 by The Minneapolis Star-Tribune. In 2007, Alvarez wrote The Snow Queen: a fairytale for strange adults for Undermain Theatre. A second volume of her collected plays, The Plays of Lynne Alvarez: Later Plays and Selected Poems was published in 2008. Esperanza Rising was performed in the summer 2008 at the Goodman Theatre’s Latino Theatre Festival

"Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice, now receiving a luminous, exquisitely refined production at Undermain Theatre... delightfully entertaining, especially so thanks to the Undermain actors' masterly performances under director Bruce DuBose... Ms. Munoz and Mr. Brooks make an achingly romantic couple, and Mr. Pittman and Mr. Williams are wonderfully vivid... The show looks and sounds stunning... thanks to superb designs all round... With Eurydice, it's not really that Undermain has moved toward the mainstream. No, mainstream American theater has finally caught up to the capacities of Undermain." -Lawson Taitte, The Dallas Morning News

Performance artists Laura Jorgensen and Fred Curchack are up to some crazy – and amazingly athletic -- monkey business at Undermain Theatre! Monkey: The Quest to the West, created and performed by the two actors, is based on a 16th century Chinese fantasy narrative titled Monkey: Record of a Journey to the West, a vernacular novel of 100 chapters by Wu Cheng-en about the pilgrimage to India of a Buddhist priest helped along his journey by a fabulous stone monkey, the earthy hero of the work.

Assisted only by a tambourine and various bells and cymbals, the actors dive into this extravagant tale. In white kung fu outfits (made in Pakistan, according to Curchack) the two high-energy performers portray some 40 different characters that Monkey encounters following his birth out of a magical pregnant rock that bursts open to reveal a stone monkey (Jorgensen) with a single-minded need to live forever. This wildly manic quest for immortality shapes the story – and takes the brilliant and fearless monkey hero all over heaven and earth on his pilgrimage.

Of course, it’s nuts that a monkey seeks the spiritual enlightenment of immortality – but you gotta love this ape’s determination. Jorgensen huffs and jumps around like a proud monkey when he bravely steps through a waterfall and finds a Happy Land for his people. She kneels humbly before a great teacher – or stands face-to-face with the Demon King – whatever it takes. Thrown into the underworld, Monkey’s all jungle bravado, “You zombies want a piece of Monkey – come on!”

Monkey may not have a scholar’s knowledge of the higher worlds, but he has a poor animal’s appreciation of reality: “If you’re not honest and you’re not true, you’re just a pile of monkey poo!” he tells his people – for he becomes the “handsome Monkey King.” Our hero gets a little obsessed with weapons power – a hilarious rant on a collapsible magic sword! -- but manages to get back on track. And Monkey isn’t settling for some religious ritual – Dao, Tao, whatever. If it’s not gonna make him immortal, then forget it. This ape wants off the birth-death-rebirth merry-go-round!

Curchack plays all the demons, monkey children, heavenly maidens, celestial warriors, dragons (my favorite) and enlightened teachers Monkey confronts in his travels – and the actor never confuses us as to which role he’s stepped into for a minute. He’s funniest – and most telling – as the know-it-all master furiously telling Monkey, “Action is an illusion, you mindless monkey, you stupid, stinkin’ simian!” For Monkey can bring out the ire in even the most spiritual of teachers.

Half the fun of this breathless show, which runs 105 minutes with intermission, is the helter-skelter speed with which the action moves forward. We wing along from adventure to adventure with our magical performers, never worried about plot development – it’s a journey – or some fine nuance of character. Monkey’s on a mission – and if we find ourselves laughing out loud at some of the bureaucrats and spiritual shenanigans he encounters – well, then, we are sharing in our hero’s hard-earned enlightenment.

Monkey: The Quest to the West runs Thursdays through Saturdays through October 18 at Undermain Theatre, 3200 Main Street. For tickets, call 214-747-5515 or go to www.undermain.org.

Katherine Owens was chosen in 2008 as a Woman of Distinction by the Dallas branch of American Association of University Women. She was saluted at a reception on April 26, 2008.