Word: serban
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Directed by Andrei Serban...
...need to cloak his work with the patina of plagiarism. According to Brecht's doctrine of the epic play, setting works in an unfamiliar and unsympathetic context allows the audience to absorb the message of the works rather than getting absorbed in the character and stories. If Andrei Serban's seminew production of Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan shows anything, it's that a playwright's intentions can be taken far beyond the level of good taste and still work as great theater. Assuming of course, that your idea of great theater is irony applied with...
...Good Woman has all the nasty wit of his best known work, The Threepenny Opera. Unfortunely, Opera collaborator Kurt Weill was long gone when Brecht wrote this play, so director Serban commissioned hip New York composer Elizabath Swados to score Brecht's songs. Some of her past work like Runaways, has been pretty vile, but in Good Woman some of her curt, antimelodic songs are pretty fair substitutes for Weill. This is less laziness on Swados's part, I think, than the fact that Weill's music was the perfect accompaniment to Brecht's cynical, plebian lyrics...
...Though Serban's past work at the ART has been characterized by astonishing visual elegance, The Good Woman can only be described as kitsch chinoiserie. There are lots of "Ah so"s and "Honorable sirs" and wavings of fans here, which in almost any other context would look offensively cliched but here fit in perfectly with Brecht's consciously artificial evocation of China. The odd thing about Serban's kitchen sink approach is that he seems to borrow almost as many Japanese conventions as Chinese, suggesting that Serban has been dealing his Orientalism from a rather shallow supply...
...There are long stretches of dialogue where Ribman replaces invention with swatches of poetic mish-mash; and there is one character, a Mrs. Karras, who cannot have any other reason for existing except to provide a contracted actress with a job for the evening. And in a few instances Serban gives in to the urge to be maddeningly and incongruously ambiguous, as when he has two characters enter from a glowing portal set in a huge tapestry depicting a boar hunt. You think of the Juniper Tree rhinoceri and shake your head...