Word: serban
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...ANDREI SERBAN has staged an average of one production of season for the American Repertory Theatre--more than any other director, including the theater's founder and artistic director, Robert Brustein. As familiarity breeds contempt, especially in high culture, we might conclude that there is something wrong with him. Why would any real world-class auteur hang around Harvard Square? Robert Wilson seems only to spend scattered weeks here between breakfast meetings in Vladivostok and fundraisers in Kuala Lumpur. Now, there, there's an artiste...
Directed by Andrei Serban...
However, whatever reasons Serban has for returning again and again to Cambridge--maybe he likes the weather, who knows--we should be thankful for them. Every production he has staged, from a frenetic Sganarelle done with wooden poles and bedsheets to his Wilsonesque The Juniper Tree with its giant, inexplicable rhinocerous, has been original and rewarding. He has no distinctive stylistic trademark other than a fertile imagination and a refreshingly practical understanding of the stage and stage practice. His one consistent method, common with auteur directors, has been to rely on classic texts. A playwright can't argue with...
...imagine a hypothetical moment during the rehearsals of Sweet Table at the Richelieu, Serban's latest with the A.R.T., when playwright Ronald Ribman offers a comment from the corner and Serban jumps a foot into the air with fright. The result of his first collaboration with a pre-immortal is a production that is far more textually-oriented than the followers of Serban and the A.R.T. are accustomed, presented with a restrained staging that supports the material, infusing it, as the stage is supposed to do, with life...
Atypically for the A.R.T., this is a play that relies on the quality of ensemble performances for its success, and even more atypically, it works. The acting is almost uniformly excellent; and Serban has proven that he can work with living actors as well as masks and puppets. The direction relies heavily on the power of gesture to further the dramatic development, and it is done so skillfully that the manner in which a hand is moved across space may strike home profoundly. The new additions to the A.R.T.'s permanent company all appear form this production to augment...