Photo: Blanca with Vincent D'Onofrio after final presentation of 'Clive'

THANX FOR SHARING, BLANCA!

'Clive' is done, Spring ahead some hair for Vincent D'Onofrio

THANX TO BLANCA FOR SHARING HER PHOTOS!

Oscar picks and New York theater...'Clive'

IRV BAUER ON SCREEN WRITING

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Irv Bauer

The ,”OSCARS,”…AND DRAMATIC REVELATIONS…let’s say it wasn’t about marketing and was about artistic merit … we should be so lucky!

My Choices :

Best Supporting Actress: Sally Field – “Lincoln”

Best Supporting Actor: I have no horse in this race.

Best Actress: Emmanuelle Riva – “Amour”

Best Actor: Daniel Day Lewis – “Lincoln”

Best Director: Ang Lee – “Life of Pi”

Best Original Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino – “Django Unchained”

Best Adapted Screenplay: David Magee – “Life of Pi”

Best Documentary: Dov Moreh, Philippa Kowarsky and Estelle Fialon – “The Gatekeepers”

Best Foreign Film: Michael Haneke – “Amour”

This was a hard one. It was also the most interesting categorie as well as the most competitive.

“Amour,” and “A Royal Affair,” a toss up with the edge going to, “Amour.” Not far behind and worth a shout out, “No,” is right up there. All three very good films. Bravo to all, and as long as we are, hailing…, “Life of Pi,” again, loudly, and for all time.

The Dramatic revelation…

Just for a change of pace, I went to the Theater.

STEPHEN SONDHEIM and ETHAN HAWKE

Ethan Hawke in “Clive”

“CLIVE” at The New Group in New York

At The New Group, one of the more adventurous and ambitious of New York’s Theater Companies we have, “Clive.” The New Group do a limited number of plays each season, carefully chosen, well produced, directed and acted. Their standards are very high. Thy are consistently reliable and if they slip occasionally …they do try. The Artistic Director, Scott Elliot, is relentless in trying to bring interesting work to his audiences. Geoff Rich, the Executive Director says that what they try to do is to provide, “a true forum for the present culture.”

“Clive,” is written by Jonathan Marc Sherman and directed by Ethan Hawke. Mr. Hawke also plays the title character of Clive, fills and carries the play.

Watching the play I found myself thinking about actors. I have always thought actors to be the gift of the theater. Acting is not a 9 to 5 job and then you go home and zone out in front of the TV. They are in it come hell or high water and always at war with the beast. The next role, the workshops, classes, readings, rounds, agents, small parts, smaller parts, commercials, the road, waiting on tables, driving cabs, the chatter, the backbiting, who else can you talk to but other actors, the friendships … what I did for love… and always the craft … doing what you love to do with your life’s blood. And don’t try to explain it to anybody. In the words of the film heartthrob of yester-year, Van Johnson, “they’re civilians.” Actors must act and part of their great frustration, is the lack of opportunity. So we see in, “Clive,” Vincent D’Onofrio, a bavura actor. You’ll recognize him from TV’s, “Criminal Intent.” He brings the stage to life. We should see more of him on our stages. The ensemble is terrific. It’s like one big acting class. Young actors trying to shine in their instant choices to realize a moment and then move on. You have to start somewhere.

Ethan Hawke is a film star. “Training Day,” “Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead,” among many others. He has also been, “a contender,” on Broadway. Tom Stoppard’s, “The Coast of Utopia,” “Henry 1V,” “The Sea Gull,” all big time stuff. He has paid his dues… made, makes choices of grandeur. Rather than playing it safe, nestling into the star actor’s prerogatives of audience adulation and approval, he has carved out a different path for himself.  He wants to not only challenge himself, but also lead a meaningful, artistic and for him, healthy and vigorous life in a very difficult and frustrating cultural environment. He seems to be having a good time. It all comes together in, “Clive.” He is the reason for and the fulfillment of, ” Clive.” I guess he thought it would be easier to do it all himself. He gets an A for effort and a B for getting burned.

Not nearly all his fault. Jonathan Marc Sherman, says that, “Clive” is based on, inspired by, and stolen from the German version of Bertolt Brecht’s “Baal.” Mr. Sherman goes on to say that he used a literal translation to do his adaptation. It might have made a difference if the adapter understood German and breathed the nuance and texture of what meaning lay beneath the words in German so that he could adequately find the English understanding for the adaptation. What did the original play say …what was, “Baal,” all about?

We all steal. The key is to steal from the best and then do your version, wonderfully. Brecht pinched from John Gay’s, “Beggar’s Opera,” for his, “Three Penny Opera.” He took what he wanted and then made magic with it.

“Baal,” was Brecht’s first play, written when he was 20, in 1918. It is an angry young man’s play. A German young man, struggling with the society he was living in. Germany had lost the first World War. The country was in chaos. Brecht was furious with the theater and it’s taste for illusion and theatrical magic. He wanted to shake it up, rip it down, move his audiences with his vision of social conditions as they were. He wanted to provoke change by the challenge of his work on the stage. He was audacious, in your face, no holds bared, society, warts most of all. His was a theater of the despised, the depraved, and the despairing. Theater to run from. It was harsh …brutish … gutteral, like the German language itself. That was his, “Baal.” You can have cake if you are prepared to pay for it. Even if you aren’t. So long as you pay, and he would make his audiences pay. You see the seeds in, “Baal,” of, “The Three Penny Opera.” He’s talking about the same down-trodden underclass, but he had a social concern. I don’t see that social concern transposed to our culture, in, “Clive.” So what is, “Clive,” about?

Of course Mr. Sherman has updated, language, characterizations, locations … all to make it seem new and shiney today. For all of his changes, unless you find the right equivalents, things don’t remain the same, even if you intend them to equate. They just don’t. Mr. Sherman is talented … there are flashes … moments … some insights, crude but they and an honest attempt at relevance. There integrated musical doors with strings hanging from them; sounds nuts, but they are woven into the production design and occasionally plucked by characters scratching out melodic sound (not overdone) to enhance, contribute, to the dramatic moments. Surprised as I was …they work.  Another attempt at style is when the characters break to the audience and speak their own stage directions … a devise that added …what? It felt like an affectation of playwriting that was passed off for Brechtian style. And…more important … Mr. Sherman doesn’t have to do the dirty. He doesn’t fulfill the potential of the production. He doesn’t show the ugliness in all of its larger than life frontal assault on our sensibilities. Naming rape, seduction, assault, brutality … death …is really not the same as seeing it up front and personal. We get shadows, whispers of grossness, callousness, the harshness of man’s inhumanity to woman, and man. We see actorly versions of our culture’s underbelly, leaning heavily on sex, drugs and rock and roll for it’s own sake …and then I wrote … So What … or paraphrasing the mantra in, “Clive,” “A rat dies in the gutter … so what …?” Indeed … so what. Who cares.  And …we should care … about something or some one. Up there on the stage something must be happening that touches me at some point, for some reason. You can’t just tell me that everything is shit and so what … What does that say about me sitting in the dark nibbling my fear. I go to the theater for nourishment of some kind, not to just take up space and time. Nothing really happens in Clive’s story. He just is … and does l… destructive to himself and everyone, women, men, virgins, babies, anyone near him, anyone who might care for him, and then …, “a rat dies in the gutter … so what,” …and everyone shares the blame … including all of us.

About Irv Bauer

Screenwriter/Educator: IRV BAUER, has taught Screenwriting at the New York University’s Film School, at Sarah Lawrence College, and The Australian National Film School as well as in Master Classes at Cornell and at many other prominent venues. At the University of Bridgeport and The Minneapolis Playwright’s Lab he taught Playwriting as well as at the New Dramatist's in New York. At the University of Washington he taught Adaptation at the graduate level. In addition, Irv has taught workshops and seminars on screenwriting all over the world including special seminars for film and media communities in London, Paris, Sydney and New York and Los Angeles. His enormously popular annual two-week Summer Screenwriting Intensive in New York in July and Spoleto, Italy in August are attended by students from all over the world.

Hello, Vincent!

Photo: Vincent D'Onofrio and Ethan Hawke in 'Clive'...

ETHAN HAWKE FACEBOOK PAGE FOR PHOTO BELOW

And through the years...

'“Clive” - A dark human drama without the humanity'

STAGEBUZZ.COM

By Judd Hollander

Photos: Monique Carboni

The New Group presents a powerful look at one man's hedonistic descent into self-destruction withClive, now at Theatre Row Studios.

Based on, inspired by and stolen from the German version of Bertolt Brecht's Baal -written in 1918 and retold here by Jonathan Marc Silverman - as noted in the press notes, Ethan Hawke directs and stars as the title character, a man who is basically a walking train wreck. A struggling New York musician who lives in a seventh floor walk-up, attempts to get his career going are continually stifled by his excesses of sex, drugs and alcohol. His having an affair with the wife of the man who might have become his music producer was also probably not a good idea. In short order Clive takes one woman after another into his bed, all the while snorting cocaine off everything from a woman's breast to his own guitar.

One can safely state that Clive is a totally despicable character in every way, yet for some unknown reason, women fall all over themselves to please him, to be with him and ultimately fall in love with him. Yet he feels nothing in these encounters but his own need for pleasure and release. Or does he in reality feel something so deep one can only catch a fleeting glimmer of it? He does at rare moments display a moment of regret, though it quickly vanishes, if it were ever actually there in the first place. It's this aspect of not knowing which makes the story and character so interesting, as one tries to make sense of what is presented.

It's also not only the ladies who wind up permanently hurt by Clive's actions. Rather, just about everyone whose path he crosses winds up damaged, such as Joey (Aaron Krohn), an earnest fellow who ends up becoming a drunk in his own right, at least part of that end game having to do with Clive's encounter with Joanna (Zoe Kazan), Joey's once-virginal girlfriend. Clive's one true friend is the mysterious Doc (wonderfully played by Vincent D'Onofrio), a big burly enigma of man who at one point almost seems to embody the darker side of Clive, if such a thing is possible, continually urging his friend to go deeper and deeper into the moral abyss.

This running theme of reaping what one sows also serves to undo the play somewhat, as there is no emotional or intellectual connection offered as a means to get inside Clive's head and see just what is driving him. It's a problem that also hinders other character development of the play time and again. So while the production in itself is quite interesting, said interest comes from watching what happens and seeing how far Clive can go, rather than caring at all about just where he or the others in the play end up. Thus the story becomes more vicariously powerful than anything more meaningful.

Hawke does do a great job as Clive, portraying someone whose life has been spiraling out of control long before the show began. Directorially, Hawke keeps the action moving and the information imparted interesting enough, where just as one thinks events can't get any worse, they do. However, as mentioned above, having a little more emotional connection with Clive would have made the play work better. Whether this is a problem that lies solely with Hawke's interpretation and direction, or in Silverman's adaptation of the original tale, or in the original tale itself is open to question. The show does a good job in setting events in no particular point in time--it supposedly takes place in the 1990s, but could actually be happening pretty much anywhere over the last 35 years or so.

The rest of the actors, most of whom play multiple roles, all do quite well. Kazan is effective as the innocent yet questioning Joanna, while Krohn offers a somber look at his own moral collapse - going from a seemingly principled young man to what is essentially another Clive in training. D'Onofrio is excellent as the stranger that is Doc, a person who offers far more questions than answers and who latches onto Clive with a figurative death grip, one which Clive eventually learns to embrace. So much so that Clive tries to destroy Doc's own little moments of personal happiness. Kazan is also particularly poignant as Sophie, a woman who, like all the others should run as far away from Clive as she can, but who also like all others is captivated by the mysterious magnetism that Clive exudes and finds she cannot leave, nor does she want to.

The various sets by Derek McLane nicely fit the atmosphere of play and the sound design by Shane Rettig works well.

An interesting piece to be sure, Clive presents a fascinating tale of one human being's destruction and degradation, without really including the human factor in the equation. A choice which has both its pluses and minuses in the finished product.

Clive

By Jonathan Marc Silverman

Directed by Ethan Hawke

Featuring: Brooks Ashmanskas (2nd Man), Vincent D'Onofrio (Doc) Ethan Hawke (Clive), Stephanie Janssen (1st Woman), Mahira Kakkar (2nd Woman), Zoe Kazan (3rd Woman), Aaron Krohn (1st Man), Dana Lyn (4th Woman), Jonathan Marc Sherman (3rd Man)

Set: Derek McLane

Costumes: Catherine Zuber

Lighting: Jeff Croiter

Sound: Shane Rettig

Music & Sound Sculpture: Gaines

Assistant Director: Marie Master, Sam Creely

Fight Director: David Anzuelo

Production Supervisor: Peter R. Feuchtwanger, PRF Productions

Production Stage Manager: Valerie A. Peterson

Casting: Judy Henderson, C.S.A.

Public Relations: Bridget Klapinski, Seven17 PR

Presented by The New Group

Acorn Theatre

Theatre Row Studios

Actor theatre

410 West 42nd Street

Tickets: 212-239-6200 or www.telecharge.com

Information: www.thenewgroup.org

Closes: March 9, 2013

Running Time: 1 Hour, 45 minutes, no intermission

Video Clip #3 from 'Clive' + chance to win pair of tickets

The New Group

Happy Valentine's Day! In celebration of passing 1,100 likes on Facebook and in honor of the holiday, We're giving away a pair of tickets to CLIVE this Monday night! All you have to do is like this video or retweet it. The contest ends at 6PM tonight so don't miss out!

'The Sound of Despair, Played on a Door'

TDF STAGES

The New Group’s “Clive” makes music out of trash and doorframes

The characters in Clive come and go abruptly, usually driven away by the toxic narcissism of the titular character, played with a peroxided snarl by star and director Ethan Hawke. But the doors through which Clive’s compatriots, enemies, and conquests enter and exit are more than just portals in and out of Clive’s drunken fiefdom; they also serve as unlikely instruments, sound sculptures designed by art world duo GAINES.

The most prominent of those sculptures looks like a deconstructed piano. The strings are pulled taut in front of the audience, and piano hammers lie against them waiting to be thwacked by an actor. Other doors serve as echo chambers, boasting bowls into which performers can murmur, croon, and shout. All of them serve to underscore this adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s first play Baal, written by Jonathan Marc Sherman and transplanted from 1920s Germany to 1990s Manhattan. Baal becomes Clive, a dissolute rock star who uses and destroys people with the casualness of a sociopath. As he begins to flail, the doors contribute an increasingly melancholy and haunting soundtrack to his self-destruction.

Brothers Latham and Shelby Gaines first collaborated with Hawke when the latter was directing The New Group’s revival of Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind. For that production, the two musicians were on stage, but only their work shares the spotlight with Hawke this time around. “We had fun in our little cubbyhole of Lie of the Mind, Shelby Gaines says. “But when you’re in the show you never see the show, so this was much different and very satisfying.”

For the brothers, part of Clive‘s appeal was the chance to experience their work played by other people. The cast turns to the seven onstage doors and coaxes Americana songs from them—including “Aura Lee,” “I Shall Not Be Moved,” and, in a nod to the Brechtian origins and possibly a wink at The Doors, “Alabama Song”—a stark contrast to the skinny-pants-clad punk that Clive embodies.

“That was a massive part of the job, trying to get the actors to understand how the instruments work and getting them to play,” says Latham Gaines. “But Ethan cast very musical people, and they were very keen, very interested to learn.”

The idea of turning doors into instruments first struck the brothers over a year ago while they were in a group art show, and the idea also appealed to set designer Derek McLane. But the actual instruments and sounds were dictated not by GAINES but by the doors themselves.

“Our experience has been that we could never build the same thing twice,” says Latham Gaines. “Whatever the wood is, the thickness, the history of the door, all these factors make it so we don’t know what we’re going to get. We love that aspect of it. They kinda do what they do, and that’s just how they came out.”

As for crafting the sound sculptures, the brothers start with junk. Really. “It changes depending on the project, but it’s usually a process of finding a big pile of junk and then going through and finding something that speaks to us,” Shelby Gaines says. “It’s a visual thing to start with. And in the back of your mind you’re looking at a structure [and thinking,] ‘Would it be suitable to be strung? Does it have an acoustic quality as well?’”

The onstage results supply the soundtrack to a resolutely dark look at selfishness and sexual despair, filled with death and rape. Hearing and seeing music emanating from battered and weathered doors in real time adds a layer of authentic grime to the proceedings as they play out amidst a sea of booze and waves of regret. As Latham Gaines says, “Was it Edison who said you just need a pile of junk and some imagination to be an inventor?”
—
Mark Peikert is N.Y. Bureau Chief at Backstage Magazine
Photo by Monique Carboni

Video Clip #2 from 'Clive' play with Vincent D'Onofrio and Ethan Hawke

The girls with Vincent D'Onofrio after 'Clive'

Some of the girls in the group stayed after the first matinee to catch the second showing where they had the opportunity to say 'Hello' to Vincent and get a photo...

THANX, DEBRA!

Video Clip of Vincent D'Onofrio and Ethan Hawke in 'Clive' play

REVIEW: Clive by The Playgoer

THE PLAYGOER

If I told you that Ethan Hawke was enlisting playwright friend Jonathan Marc Sherman to adapt Brecht's Baal for him to star in (and direct) so he could sport a Billy Idol 'do, wheeze away at the guitar, and surround himself with scantily clad babes for an intermissionless hour and forty minutes in front of a paying audience... you'd probably say: gee, that sounds pretty indulgent.

And guess what? You'd be right!

"Clive" chewed out by the mighty bear D'Onofrio.
Photo: Sara Krulwiich, New York Times

Not much more can be said about Clive (the re-titled adaptation) that already hasn't been by the first round of scathing reviews.  But I'll just add that mere self-indulgence isn't even the biggest problem with the show. The problem is Baal. Now I'm embarrassed to admit that I have never read Baal--Brecht's first play that is rarely if ever produced and/or studied today. But I do know enough to know that it's not the kind of work we now expect from Brecht. This is Brecht the angry teenager--channeling German late-romantic decadence and nihilism. (The deliberately schematic expressionistic narrative charts the slow decline and assorted crimes of a hedonistic rebel poet.) So all it would have going for it is really the poetry. Poetry, of course, is hard enough to fulfill in translation. But am I right to be extra dubious about the ability of Mr. Sherman (still known chiefly as the author of that acting school staple Women and Wallace) to match the poetry of a young Bertolt Brecht?  (Especially when Sherman admits in the program to adapting the original German text via Google Translate!)

Updating Baal, as Clive does, to the Rent-era1990s might have seemed to Hawke and Sherman (and New Group A.D. Scott Elliott who has produced it) the most sensible thing to do, this choice may be the project's fatal flaw, even if its only reason for being. This muddled and pretty generic picture of punk/grunge Alphabet City ennui ends up not nearly as interesting or arresting as Baal would be in its original period of Weimar Germany--which I imagine unfolding in a series of Egon Schiele images brought to life.

The only reason, I assumed, to do this kind of "update" of Baal would be as an excuse to stage a decadent rock-concert mash-up of Brecht's basic idea. I'd be ok with that. But while Clive is billed as only being "inspired" by Baal, the adaptation isn't nearly free enough to make the concept work. Plus, worst of all: the music stinks!  What there is of it, at least. Hawke does bear a properly debauched Tom Waits-style voice (or is that just Hawke's usual untrained, strained raspiness? the flu?), but he can barely get a chord out of his ever-present guitar. If "Clive" is supposed to be some magnetic rocker who packs them in at Bowery Ballroom...well let's just say you're not going to want his CD.

To end on a higher note, though, I will say I was most looking forward to Clive for the chance to see a rare stage appearance by the mighty Vincent D'Onofrio. My only disappointment he wasn't in it more. Playing the sidekick character, he seems miscast, being some 15 years older than Hawke and sporting some odd redneck accent+mustache. But when he actually does get to plant his big, big presence center stage--even for something as ridiculous as dog-whoofing--I wanted more.  Come back, Vincent, come back! Forget Ethan and even Bertolt and go back to Sam Shepard where you belong!

The girls waiting at Acorn Theatre for photo op with Vincent D'Onofrio

UNFORTUNATELY, VINCENT COULDN'T MEET THE GIRLS AFTERWARDS BUT WORD IS THAT THEY ALL GOT TO MEET ZOE KAZAN.

Debra, Vikeau, Ruby, Chris Carr, Jennifer, Unnamed

THANK YOU, BLANCA!

Video: Ethan Hawke's Radical Makeover

AOL

'Clive' Review by Marilyn Stasio

Marilyn Stasio, Variety

3:30 am, February 8, 2013

Via Chicago Tribune

Stars just wanna have fun. And who dares deny them their sport, when we're talking about high-profile thesps like Ethan Hawke and Vincent D'Onofrio, currently frolicking with the New Group in "Clive"? Jonathan Marc Sherman's baggy adaptation of "Baal" transforms the dissolute 1920s poet of Bertolt Brecht's first play into a dissolute 1990s songwriter, and Hawke's loose helming prompts the cast to unleash its collective id and revel in the play's strenuous debauchery. Finding itself ignored, the audience might feel like tiptoeing out and leaving the players to enjoy their private party.

Just when we thought we'd finally seen the last of it, punk lives again. Despite the shame of having to answer to the absurd name of Clive, Hawke does a pretty good impression of a better-nourished Sid Vicious -- although the bogus musicians backing him up are but a pale imitation of the Sex Pistols. Sexy/scary in spiked bleached-blond hair and black leather trousers so tight they look like they were stitched onto his bare butt by costumer Catherine Zuber, the strutting Hawke tackles with gusto his Brechtian role of the punk antichrist who corrupts everyone he meets and spoils everything he touches.

In updating the material, Sherman makes a point of preserving the pivotal character of Baal/Clive as the amoral artist who shows his contempt for bourgeois society by taking its money, screwing its women and mocking its values through his subversive art.

The broad liberties the scribe has taken with the original story are practical without being especially imaginative. The pompous burgher whose wife Baal seduces is reborn here as a self-important music producer who practically hands his woman to Clive. Baal's drinking companions are recast in Clive's world as cokeheads and smack junkies.

Loose as it is, the script does preserve all the essential plot details about deflowering virgins, betraying comrades, driving women to suicide, and killing his best friend -- all dynamic activities that Hawke pursues with an impish grin. It's the kind of performance that simply mows down anyone in its crosshairs.

Not that the supporting players offer much resistance. Only Zoe Kazan, playing a waiflike virgin and looking positively edible in her little white dress and Madonna-inspired gloves, manages to portray something that resembles a character.

The only one who keeps Hawke from swallowing the show whole is D'Onofrio as Doc, a mysterious figure who seems to have originated with Baal's friend, Ekart. This slippery character first appears as a satanic presence, but mutates into Clive's friend and eventually his victim. Untroubled by the fact that he's playing a character that makes no sense, D'Onofrio taps into the unpredictable persona of that crazy cop he plays on "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" and just goes with the erratic flow.

Will Doc revert to his satanic self? Will he save Clive from himself or leave him to his fate? Who knows. The character shifts direction like a weather vane, and D'Onofrio gleefully goes along for the ride.

In one scene that looks completely improvisational, Doc and Clive are sitting on the floor of a cabin hideaway, having a close encounter, so close that Doc looks as if he will either kiss Clive's lips or bite them off. With D'Onofrio, it could go either way -- an unpredictable quality that Brecht himself might consider to be the essence of a scary performance.

Still more photos of 'Clive' After Party w/ Vincent D'Onofrio

BROADWAYWORLD.COM

'Theater Reviews: Ethan Hawke’s Clive'

VULTURE
By Scott Brown

Clive
I feel like Ethan Hawke and I have grown old together. His latest directorial effort, Clive, is brief yet interrrrrrminable, and our lives together flashed before my eyes. (Slowly. Excruciatingly!) We were Explorers together, we bit reality just a few years apart, and we will always, always have Paris, and Julie Delpy. (Well: He will.) Hawke was X, I was Y; he was a whole lot prettier and, I can safely assume, had a whole lot more fun, his mirror-practiced mope-face aside. And to paraphrase another nineties totem The Crying Game — we're certainly not a young thing anymore.

You know who is a young thing? And always will be? Bertolt Brecht's Baal, the quasi-anti-romantic hero of his first play, Baal. He's all cruelty and animal vitality — a user and discarder of women and men (but especially women), a predator, a scavenger, and, naturally, an artist, though not a particularly great one. (The best, most endearing aspect of Baal is what a square and lame-o poet he is.) Brecht was a college student when he created the character and seems to have had no thunderous opinion on what Baal meant as an archetype or as a man. He was interested in what he was, his phenomenology, how a Baal functioned in a fallen world. Later, Brecht would call Baal a "relative man," a "passive genius" deft at "exploiting the exploiters," who is "antisocial, but in an antisocial society." All of this sounds a lot like late-breaking revisionism to me. (Brecht also wrote, "I admit (and advise you): This play is lacking in wisdom.") There were a lot of fascists running around, hijacking Expressionism, claiming the postromantic hero as their own, and this play was a molotov lobbed through the window of that particularly villainous frat house. Like Baal, Brecht was just having a good time being bad, in anticipation of very bad times to come. 

The problem with Clive — "based on, inspired by, stolen from Brecht's Baal" — is that it's not having a very good time at all. It lacks relish, which would seem to be a key ingredient in any story about the ruthless pursuit of pleasure. Clive is directed by Hawke, who also stars as the title character, a would-be rock idol with Billy Idolatrous hair and eye shadow. It’s set in the kinda-nineties, and there are cheeky nods to Reality Bites, especially in Clive's plunky three-chord songs. At times, the whole thing seems to be a joke on the Hawke persona — or maybe just a joke, period. (In his author's note, playwright/adaptor Jonathan Marc Sherman writes, "I worked from a literal translation courtesy of Google Translate. I do not recommend that you try this." And how!)

But the jest, alas, savours but of shallow wit, when hundreds sleep more than do laugh at it. (Wow, Clive apparently brings out the intellectually defensive English major in all of us!) The opening is highly promising: A grim if not really sincere benediction on the nature of evil from Doc (twitch-monster-from-another-dimension Vincent D'Onofrio, who doffs his hairpiece and puts on a cornpone drawl). This is followed by a strummed hymn croaked by Clive himself. Everyone's hopping around Derek McClane's abstract-yet-lived-in set, with its doors to nowhere and hidden musical instruments built into every cranny. It's a world absotively wet with possibility, a world just waiting to be diddled and despoiled. Now what? 

Now … not much. Clive proceeds systematically to sabotage his ascent as a rock star, throw offal in the faces of the powerful, and go through women like the Goodwill rummage bin. He has two idée fixes: a teenage girl (Zoe Kazan, who has a gift for indecency I wish this production would allow her to explore even further) and an ursine hill-spirit of a grown man (D'Onofrio). Both are innocents, both are Clive (or facets of Clive), and our bad boy, caught between them, eventually destroys both in defense of his sacred independence. Hawke's performance falls into an uncanny valley: He's too close to Clive to have perspective, but too different — and, frankly, a bit too old — to merge with the feral fun. He falls back on the throaty, craggy slackerdom we know so well, and misses opportunities to guide and focus the show's energies as a director, perhaps because he's too busy with actor business. (Hawke's an excellent director — his Lie of the Mind proved that, but it's a tall order to direct and act when you are the play.)  Clive feels more like a busy little bureaucratic tangle of inside jokes and outsize personalities than a fully fleshed production. Instead of pulsating with forbidden, demonic energy, it just kind of sits there chuckling bitterly, the gnomic drunk in the corner instead of the life of the party. Well, balls.   

Clive is playing at Theatre Row through March 9.

'STAGE PORTRAIT: Ethan Hawke, Vincent D'Onofrio and Zoe Kazan in Clive'

PLAYBILL

08 Feb 2013

Acclaimed illustrator Ken Fallin's drawings of the greatest stars and scenes of the theatrical world are a recurring part of Playbill.com.

This week Fallin captures The New Group's production of Jonathan Marc Sherman's Clive, about a songwriter living in New York City in the '90s, which recently opened at The New Group at Theatre Row.

Pictured below are Vincent D'Onofrio, Zoe Kazanand Ethan Hawke.

To purchase prints or original art, e-mail haroldsgallery@gmail.com.
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Ken Fallin began his career as an illustrator by lovingly mimicking the style of the late, legendary Al Hirschfeld for the poster art for Forbidden Broadway. Since that time he has been a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal as well as The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Hollywood Reporter, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune and The New Yorker.

His work has illustrated major ad campaigns for American Express, Showtime and Belvedere Vodka. Most recently, he was nominated for a 2010 Emmy for his animated commercial for CNBC.

More 'Clive' After Party Photos

PLAYBILL

'Peter Dinklage, Vincent D'Onofrio, Ethan Hawke, Chloë Sevigny Meet Off-Broadway's Clive on Opening Night'

TOWLEROAD


BY NAVEEN KUMAR
Realism bites—and so does reality, for that matter. Before Ethan and Winona, there was Bertolt Brecht, the anti-naturalist whose 1923 play Baal, about the self-propelled downward spiral of a poet-cum-anti-hero, serves as inspiration for Jonathan Marc Sherman’s Clive, which opened Off Broadway last night in a New Group production at the Acorn Theatre.

Appropriately enough, Sherman sets his retelling—directed by and starring frequent New Group collaborator Ethan Hawke—squarely in the Gen-X hunk’s heyday: that angsty, flannel-clad era when grungy rock stars burnt up quickly with unironic rage, the 1990s. It’s a far cry from Brecht’s pre WWII Germany, but the portrait of an artist-as-hedonistic-narcissist is a tale as old as time.

Sherman refashions Brecht’s drunken German poet into a drunken New York City musician named Clive, played by Hawke. Following the basic framework of Brecht’s plot, the play presents a series of disjointed, episodic scenes rather than a clear, conventional storyline. Though increasingly bizarre in style as the play progresses, scenes chronicle the sort of typical bad behavior you might expect from a rocker who looks like Ethan Hawke living in 1990s New York City—plenty of booze, pills, and of course, much womanizing with consequences of varying severity.

You shouldn’t need to know much about a play’s source material to greet it on its own terms (although the New Group does provide a written insert), but a few minimally nuanced tidbits from Brecht’s Wiki might be helpful here for anyone who didn’t go to drama school.

Though Brecht wrote Baal when he was twenty, before fully developing his signature theory and practice of ‘epic theatre’ (and becoming a staunch Marxist), nascent elements of it are on display here. Brecht and his peers were foremost insistent that the audience never get swept up by the action of a play and forget that they’re sitting in a theatre.

Actors speak their actions (“I wept, openly!”) often in place of performing them, and frequently address the audience directly, breaking the so-called fourth wall.
Alienation, though not an accepted translation of Brecht's desired effect, can feel pretty accurate in Sherman and Hawke's borrowed aesthetic.

Hawke’s ensemble cast includes Vincent D’Onofrio (Law & Order: Criminal Intent), indie darling Zoe Kazan (Angels in America), comic chameleon Brooks Ashmanskas (Promises, Promises), and the playwright himself, each juggling a variety of characters, most of whom are mistreated by Clive or worse on his way to rock-bottom.

The production’s integration of musical effects is both inventive and seamless, thanks in no small part to Derek McLane’s imaginative set design with uncommon instruments built into its doors. Though with both playwright and director busy on stage, Hawke’s staging seems to lack the benefit of an outsider perspective.

Brecht and the distinct style of theatre he pioneered are definitely not for everyone—i.e. if you prefer your theatre served straight-up, complete with empathetic characters and storylines and a slice-of-life for dessert, you'll likely want to fill up elsewhere. Otherwise you might ask your neighbor to nudge you awake three quarters in, so at least you can say you saw Ethan Hawke topless in a 199 seat theatre.

Clive continues performances Off Broadway at the Acron Theatre through March 9th.