PHOTOS: Vincent D'Oonofrio at 'Clive' After Party

'Hawke’s Mad Rocker Salvages ‘Clive’'

BLOOMBERG
By Jeremy Gerard February 07, 2013 10:00 PM EST

  From his electric blonde hair to the boots he wields as weapons, Ethan Hawke fully embraces the role of a rampaging monomaniac in the New Group’s headache-inducing “Clive.”

The opening scene finds the nascent rock star snorting powder off the breast of his manager’s wife, at a dinner party celebrating his recording contract. Before dessert is served, the contract will itself be so much dust.

Offered fame, Clive instead chooses drugs, debauchery and dissolution, which come all too easily from the whorl of sycophants abetting his descent into self-annihilation.

Based on Bertolt Brecht’s first play, “Baal,” a youthfully messy X-ray of Weimar Germany, Jonathan Marc Sherman’s adaptation, aggressively staged by Hawke, takes plenty of risks. They never pay off.

Brecht’s anti-hero was a poet based on Rimbaud (Peter O’Toole played Baal in a famous London production in the early 1960s). Here, Clive, on the road to excess, croaks awful songs and strums a black guitar covered with words in white. Zoe Kazan repeats herself as a naif eager to shed her innocence, and the fine Vincent D’Onofrio, a refrigerator of a man, plays Lucifer, beckoning his prey like the M.C. of “Cabaret”:

“Clive! Let everything go and come with me. To all the other dive bars. To the churches. To the zoos and the barns and the stables. God has forgotten you. Dancing. Music. Booze. Soaking rain. Burning sun. Darkness. Light. Women. Dogs.”

Strutting and preening, Hawke is never less than fascinating to watch. Still, one very long act of just under two hours feels more like the morning after than the night before.

Through March 9 at the Acorn Theatre, 410 W. 42nd St. Information: +1-212-239-6200; http://www.telecharge.com. Rating: *

PHOTO: MARK RUFFALO AND VINCENT D'ONOFRIO at 'Clive' Afterparty

The New Group ‏@TheNewGroupNYC

Mark Ruffalo and Vincent D'Onofrio at the #Clive Opening Night After Party. pic.twitter.com/CrXFjlX9

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'‘Clive’ Has Mood and Atmosphere but Little Else'

BACKSTAGE

By David Sheward | Posted Feb. 7, 2013, 8 p.m.

Photo Source: Monique Carboni

The right mood and atmosphere are essential for a successful theatrical presentation, but they only go so far. Jonathan Marc Sherman’s “Clive,” directed by and starring Ethan Hawke, has Derek McLane’s perfect sleazy setting, Jeff Croiter’s evocative lighting, and Gaines’ dark music to tell a somber tale of decadence and self-destruction. Unfortunately, the jumbled script and sloppy staging provide only unrelenting chaos and shallow characterization.

A program note describes “Clive” as “based on, inspired by, and stolen from” Bertolt Brecht’s first play, “Baal,” which was greeted with boos and critical disgust at its 1923 premiere in Leipzig, Germany. The nihilistic story follows the title character, a narcissistic poet, through a series of episodic adventures in which he lives only for pleasure. In Sherman’s update, Clive is a brutish, drug-addled rock musician who rejects a lucrative recording contract to devote himself to hedonistic pursuits. After deflowering a teenage girl who subsequently commits suicide, Clive joins the mysterious Doc on an alcohol-soaked road trip that ends in a shabby shack in the wilds of Canada. Here a broken-down Clive breathes his last as fishermen mock him by repeating “A rat dies in the gutter. Who cares?” I had the same reaction after 90 bleak minutes of constant gloom, with no insight into Clive’s reprehensible behavior or the society that created him.

Sherman attempts to re-create Brecht’s famous alienation effect by having the characters speak the stage directions and directly address the audience, but these devices come across as gimmicks and never succeed in shocking us into recognizing that we are watching a play or considering that our world is just as nightmarish as Clive’s. A few of the 21 scenes—or “shards,” as Sherman describes them—work. The opening sequence, in which Clive and his cohorts play Truth or Dare at the penthouse of a music executive, has a real sense of edgy danger, but it’s mostly downhill after that.

Hawke projects the proper debauched world-weariness and in the musical portions is convincing that Clive possesses talent but has wasted it. He also imparts a measure of the impish charm that makes this louse attractive despite his scummy actions. However, the character’s repetitive downward spiral overwhelms the actor’s inventiveness. As Doc, Vincent D’Onofrio offers an outrageous Western accent but not much else. In the multiple-role-playing ensemble, which includes the playwright, only the witty Brooks Ashmanskas creates a quirky and memorable set of loony horrors. Even the remarkable Zoe Kazan, as a series of Clive’s conquests, is reduced to simpering and batting her eyes.

It just goes to show that when both the director and the author are in the cast, an objective eye is lacking, and the production suffers.

Presented by the New Group at the Acorn Theatre, 410 W. 42nd St., NYC. Feb. 7–March 9. (212) 239-6200, (800) 447-7400, or www.telecharge.com. Casting by Judy Henderson.

Critic’s Score: D

'Theater review: ‘Clive’ at the New Group'

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

PHOTO CREDIT: MONIQUE CARBONI

Ethan Hawke plays a wasted 1990s rocker in 'Clive' and Zoe Kazan is one of his conquests.

• Title: 'Clive'
• Venue: Acorn Theatre
• Location: 410 W. 42nd St.
• Price: Tickets: $60
• Phone: (212) 244-3380

Ethan Hawke’s hair is bleached Billy Idol blond. His attitude is darkened to bleak, nihilistic black.

The choices are fitting for “Clive,” a wearying new play Hawke directs and stars in. He plays a wasted ’90s rocker who’s a serial deflowerer and dumper of women.

When one of those girls searches post-coitus for her dress, Clive sneers: “Here. I found it on the floor, right next to your virginity.”

Sweet.

Clive is such a general-purpose creep (and, eventually, murderer) that his inevitable demise inspires only indifference. Or as characters in the play put it: “A rat is dying in the gutter. So what?”

That damning little question echoes the impression left when all is said and done in this show by the ever-uneven New Group.

So what?

The puny impact is dismaying, since the full-length one-act by Jonathan Marc Sherman, who also acts in it, is “based on, inspired by and stolen from” Bertolt Brecht’s first play, “Baal.”

In 1923, at its premiere in Germany, Brecht’s work was deemed so provocative that it was closed down after one performance.

Too-hot-to-handle has cooled considerably 90 years later. The most intriguing thing about “Clive” is Derek McLane’s striking set, which comprises doorways, beer cans and baubles. But there’s no sense of danger or real daring or sharp commentary.

There is lots of Acting with a capital A. And Posing, with a capital P. Hawke, who strums a guitar and sings a bit, strikes plenty of those poses. Ditto castmates including Vincent D’Onofrio (“Law & Order: Criminal Intent”), as Clive’s burly buddy, Doc, and Zoe Kazan, who plays a couple of doomed conquests.

The outsize acting goes with this theatrical territory. Brecht isn’t about slice-of-life subtlety and dramatic illusion. He doesn’t reflect life, but holds funhouse mirrors up to it. Characters utter stage directions, like “I’m sobbing uncontrollably now.”

The bare-naked Brechtian approach to theater can create its own rules and a fascinating world. But not here. Unlike the magnetic bad-boy seducer at its center, “Clive” has no pull.

''Clive' review: Ethan Hawke directs, stars'

NEWSDAY

Published: February 6, 2013 4:51 PM By LINDA WINER linda.winer@newsday.com

Photo credit: Monique Carboni | From left, Mahira Kakkar, Stephanie Janssen and Ethan Hawke in "Clive," written by Jonathan Marc Sherman, directed by Ethan Hawke, opening Feb 7, 2013.

A note in the program of "Clive" places us in the 1990s, but promises we will "also hear the future and the past."

Well, I'm not betting a big future for this raucous, ambitious, ultimately tiresome 100-minute odyssey, except for people who want to appreciate the irresistibly watchable Ethan Hawke as he directs and stars in another of his self-challenging theater adventures.

But the past -- now that is all over the messy-moonscape stage with the corrugated wall patterns and the free-standing, dislocated doors. There's the obvious past, Bertolt Brecht's 1922 "Baal," from which the playfully smart playwright Jonathan Marc Sherman professes to have "stolen" the idea of a poet on a downward spiral of debauchery and self-destruction.

But "Clive" is also a throwback to downtown experiments in the '60s and '70s, especially Sam Shepard's 1972 poetic-musical play, "The Tooth of Crime," about sex and violence as rock warfare. Hawke, with a discipline that only looks like feral recklessness, leather pants and platinum-blond spikes, plays the title's rebel. He's a chick magnet who walks away from a record executive (Sherman in one of a variety of amusing sleazy roles), snorts his dope, seduces his wife, deflowers a virgin (Zoe Kazan in one of a variety of man-killing roles) and begins his descent to a bad death in -- wait for it -- Canada.
[HERE'S A TASTE OF VINCENT IN 'TOOTH OF CRIME' BELOW]

You see, this is silliness -- dense in a rich sense but also dense in the dumb sense, with bits of tangy poetry about our divided natures and much bad poetry about trees. People narrate their own action, a bit like Brecht, and play snatches of familiar songs -- from Elvis to Kurt Weill -- that mingle with the original sounds by the art duo/sculptors known as Gaines.

Best of all, Clive is shadowed by Doc, a mysterious hulk of a bald man with a drawl, who happens to be the first stage character Vincent D'Onofrio has played here since the late lamented "Law & Order: Criminal Intent." D'Onofrio doesn't say much, but he is perfect -- scary, fearless, able to slide music from a guitar's neck and unashamed to climb a ladder in fluffy angel wings. His is a future worth contemplating.

'First Nighter: Clive'

HUFFINGTON POST

David Finkle

Writer, Drama Critic

Ethan Hawke -- who directed and plays the title character in Jonathan Marc Sherman's Clive at the New Group's Acorn home -- begins by singing Doc Watson's "You Must Come In at the Door." He staccatos the folk-y threnody as if he were Tom Waits, and the rendition couldn't be more intriguing.

Moreover, it's a promising beginning not only for the song and the delivery (Hawke's on guitar, too) but because the "door" motif obviously dictated Derek McLane's commanding set which features seven free-standing weather-beaten doors. Beside those, there's a fringe of tinsel-like stalactites hanging over the stage where much of the action takes place in a grey conversation pit.

All to the good, so far, but that's where the not-so-good seeps into a script that Sherman has adapted from Bertolt Brecht's rarely-seen Baal, a series of scenes depicting the downfall of a benighted poet. Sherman's idea is to update the proceedings and turn the eponymous Baal into rock troubadour Clive running amok in brutal Brechtian strokes.

The free-falling Clive and sidekick Doc (Vincent D'Onofrio, with head shaved and feeling free to embroider on his disturbed Law & Order: Criminal Intent detective, Robert "Bobby" Goren) pass through several sequences that relentlessly involve life's down-trodden.

Having sung his song, Clive immediately antagonizes an entertainment executive (the more-than-ready Brooks Ashmanskas in the first of many roles), who unceremoniously tears up a lucrative contract in Clive's face. Whereupon, Clive comes into increasingly less rewarding contact with sharp operators, women of varying low degrees, a murder, an insane asylum, you-name-it-if-it's-depressing-and/or-anarchic.

The problem with Sherman's version -- perhaps with Brecht's as well -- is that there's no momentum to the succession of scenes. Rather, they merely become repetitive and pointlessly nihilistic. Worse, the accumulation of seedy locales serves as encouragement for Hawke, D'Onofrio, Ashmanskas and six others (the usually superb Zoe Kazan, among them) to wallow not in characters but in caricatures.

This is particularly disturbing with Hawke, normally one of the City's most accomplished stage figures. His recent appearance as the title malcontent in Anton Chekhov's Ivanov at CSC is one example of his powers. Another, his New Group Hurlyburly turn in 2005 was arguably the best performance by an actor that year. Possibly, as director this time, he couldn't see clearly enough what his leading man was doing.

Brecht, born in 1898, wrote Baal in 1918 when he was 20, though it wasn't produced until 1923. It's a young man's play -- the determinedly grim view of the world (not necessarily something the playwright ever completely abandoned) not surprising. Young men are habitually gratified at announcing to their elders how dreadful the world is, and in Germany's post-war period, Brecht had much to go on.

On the other hand, Sherman -- who was discovered via Woman & Wallace, written when he was 19 -- is no longer a kid, and this sort of pretentiously sophomoric material, possibly excusable in a young aspirant, is unbecoming in a playwright approaching middle age. The world of Sherman's play -- a program note says enigmatically "The 1990s, but you can also hear the future & the past" -- seems to emerge from nothing so much as a need for Sherman to pass himself off as important.

On the way out of the theater after the 90-minute, no-break piece, one dissatisfied customer was heard to remark, "If there'd been an intermission, no one would have come back." That about sums it up

'Rocker on the Eve of Destruction ‘Clive,’ With Ethan Hawke and New Group, at Acorn Theater'

THE NEW YORK TIMES

By BEN BRANTLEY

Published: February 7, 2013

PHOTO CREDIT: SARA KRULWICH

Ethan Hawke has been dying a lot in recent months. Having taken on the depressive, suicidal title character of Chekhov’s “Ivanov” late last year, he is now portraying another existentially challenged, terminal case in “Clive,” Jonathan Marc Sherman’s latter-day variation on Brecht’s “Baal.” While there are big differences — it is now Brecht instead of Chekhov, after all — the road to the grave, as mapped by Mr. Hawke, feels much the same: fretful, feverish and, ultimately, fatiguing.

Mr. Hawke deserves props for being a movie star who regularly ventures onto terrain where Broadway angels fear to tread. “Ivanov” and “Clive” are both early works from challenging dramatists that are notoriously difficult to get right. While Mr. Hawke’s characters are the unconditional centers of their plays, they are also anything but easy to love.

What’s more, he does not take the star’s prerogative of dominating the proceedings.“Ivanov,” staged by Austin Pendleton for the Classic Stage Company, and “Clive,” which opened on Thursday night at the Acorn Theater in a New Group production, are very much ensemble efforts. So I regret to say that neither show has been all that well served by its leading man or for that matter by its director, who in the case of “Clive” happens to be Mr. Hawke.

A decade or so ago Mr. Hawke, now 42, a writer as well as an actor, would have seemed a natural to play Baal. Written by Brecht in 1918, when he was only 20 and filled with contempt for the German theater of his day, “Baal” is an angry young man’s play about an angry, unwashed young artist of charismatic talent and equally magnetic destructiveness. He’s a grubby, convention-smashing outlaw poet (or poète maudit) in the great Gallic tradition of François Villon and Arthur Rimbaud.

Structured in fatalistic fragments that bring to mind Büchner’s “Woyzeck,” “Baal” courses with the sap of early manhood, when pleasure is an end in itself, and life seems both beautiful and damned. Though its portrait of a polymorphously perverse antihero (who would happily have sex with a tree) is unlikely to shock audiences today as it did in the 1920s, “Baal” still has the potential to electrify.

The current that flows through “Clive” is oddly sluggish, though, and it only rarely gives off sparks. Set in the 1990s by Mr. Sherman (“Sophistry,” “Things We Want”), Brecht’s tale of a degenerate society assumes the air of a wearily confirmed prophecy acted out in a world where everyone has by now been there, done that. And as embodied by Mr. Hawke with spiked iridescent gray hair and an expression of eternal tiredness, Clive (as Baal has been rechristened) comes across less as a satanic catalyst than just another rotten apple on a dying tree.

Mr. Sherman — who is also part of the acting ensemble, along with Vincent D’Onofrio and Zoe Kazan — has stuck close to the form and content of Brecht’s text. Of course the locale is now Giuliani’s New York instead of Augsburg, Germany, around 1911, which involves certain changes of detail. Mood-altering powders are now ingested as well as high-proof brandy; a lumberjack’s camp has been transformed into a shooting gallery; and Clive is a promising singer who performs in downtown dives instead of the oral poet of the docks that Baal was.

This means that there’s a fair amount of music in “Clive,” including a few bleak American ballads about heaven and hell (performed by Mr. Hawke in the vein of an exhausted, midcareer Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen), some snatches from the Brecht-Weill “Alabama Song” and, most ingeniously, musical doors. You heard right. Each of the free-standing doors in Derek McLane’s set has been equipped (via the sound design of Gaines) with hammers, bars and strings that allow the performers to summon tunes from them.

But if it’s not impolite to ask: Why? Are we to infer that the capacity to elicit the music of the spheres lies not just in Clive but also in everyone? In that case why are other characters so keen on signing Clive to record contracts or nightclub gigs, especially given Mr. Hawke’s rather lackluster musical performances?

There’s an argument to be made that “Baal” is as much a picture of an inhuman society as of a monstrous individual. Mr. Sherman has saidthat in translating “Baal” to the late 20th century he was struck by “how little people mistreating people has changed.” And Mr. Hawke has spoken of the “despicable” nature of everyone in the play, all propelled by “an id at work.”

But if you carry this point of view to its ultimate leveling conclusion Clive’s story is stripped of conflict. It’s hard to get worked up as Clive seduces, abandons and destroys an assortment of friends, lovers and strangers. Finding a compelling dramatic tension in Brecht, whose goal even then was to keep his audiences at a thoughtful distance, is never easy. But there should be energy at least in the execution, in the sly creation and subversion of illusions.

The cast members — who also include Brooks Ashmanskas, Stephanie Janssen, Mahira Kakkar, Aaron Krohn and Dana Lyn — do appear to be enjoying themselves, incarnating various lost souls and speaking their own stage directions in character (an interpolation by Mr. Sherman). And Ms. Kazan, for one, makes you share that pleasure as she seems to draw instant Etch A Sketch cartoons of women done wrong by the rapacious Clive. (She is helped by Catherine Zuber’s amusing virgin-vamp costumes.)

Mr. Hawke, who was excessively agitated as Ivanov, plays Clive in a more minor, subdued key, which is a surprising choice for a character meant to be an irresistible force. What magnetism there is in this production is generated by Mr. D’Onofrio, one of the great wild-card actors of his generation. (Even if you’ve seen him only as the troubled Detective Goren on “Law and Order: Criminal Intent,” you’ll know what I mean.)

Speaking, for some reason, in a down-home Southern accent, Mr. D’Onofrio portrays the rough-hewed, hedonistic Doc (Eckart in “Baal”), Clive’s best friend and probably his lover. Even delivering annotative lines like “They exit,” Mr. D’Onofrio exudes a gleeful, dangerous heat.

When he yells to Clive to come out and play in the dark, dark woods, it’s the call of the wild. It’s a sound that also fleetingly raises the pulse of a show that is, for the most part, strictly flatline.

'Clive: Theater Review'

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

Jonathan Marc Sherman’s Clive, inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s 1918 work Baal, mainly demonstrates that unplayable works don’t get any more accessible even when updated to modern times. Starring Ethan Hawke as a dissipated rock musician on a fast track to self-destruction, this amorphous drama severely tries one’s patience even as it wastes the talents of an estimable cast that also includes Zoe Kazan (Ruby Sparks) and Vincent D’Onofrio.

Reset to 1990's New York City, the play follows the basic structure of Brecht’s original play, which is rarely performed these days for a reason. Its choppy, episodic narrative quickly proves repetitive, making the same tired points over and over.

Sporting spiky silver hair, Hawke’s narcissistic singer/songwriter Clive is clearly a basket case, addicted to any number of substances and abusing every woman who comes into his path. Whether snorting cocaine off one of his female conquest’s breasts or hosting a sadistic version of Truth or Dare, he’s a thoroughly repellant character whose eventual downfall fails to spark interest.

Sherman’s adaptation, dubbed “a play in 21 shards,” is indeed jagged in its elliptical style. Running a seemingly interminable 105 minutes, it depicts the title character’s nihilistic interactions with a variety of seedy characters. Among them is Joanne (Kazan), his friend’s virginal 17-year-old fiancée who he cruelly seduces and then promptly discards with tragic consequences, and his best friend Doc (D’Onofrio), who both observes and is complicit in Clive’s wanton behavior. Eventually he too becomes a victim, stabbed to death by Clive in a fit of drunken violence.

As with Brecht’s original piece, several songs are interpolated into the proceedings, most amusingly "The Alabama Song" (from the playwright’s operatic collaboration with Kurt Weill, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny), sung by Hawke in his singularly raspy voice. Adding to the exotic atmosphere is the original music and sound design created by the art duo GAINES, which has the actors making impromptu music using elements of the set.

The piece’s expressionistic style is heightened by such scenes as when Clive and cohorts gather around the corpse of a dead junkie while wearing masks, sunglasses and fedoras. Other out-there elements include Doc’s propensity for barking like a dog and his eventual ascent into heaven with a pair of angel’s wings strapped to his back.

Hawke, who also directed, delivers an intense, admirably committed performance that nonetheless fails to make much of an impact. D’Onofrio, making a too rare NYC stage appearance, is impressively fearsome in his physicality, with his bald pate and extra poundage recalling his psychotic young soldier in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. The waif-like Kazan is movingly fragile as the doomed Joanne, while playwright Sherman and Brooks Ashmanskas ably fulfill a variety of supporting roles.

But eventually the production proves to have little reason for being, failing to provide an emotionally resonant modern-day version of its admittedly difficult source material. It mainly comes across as an actors' exercise, one that is undoubtedly more fulfilling for its creatives than for the beleaguered audience.

'Review: Ethan Hawke mines noir humor in ‘Clive’'

ARTESIA NEWS

This undated theater image released by Seven17 Public Relations shows Vincent D’Onfrio, left, and Ethan Hawke, in a scene from “Clive”, a production by The New Group performing off-Broadway at Theatre Row in New York. (AP Photo/Seven17 PR, Monique Carboni)

NEW YORK (AP) — If you want to find beauty and meaning in life, it’s probably a good idea to stop looking for it in your mirror.

Bertolt Brecht’s first full-length play “Baal,” written in 1918 when Brecht was a 20-year-old university student, was a nightmarish expressionist drama about a dissolute poet-musician seeking inspiration through sex and drugs.

The New Group’s modern-day production, “Clive,” set in the 1990s and directed by and starring Ethan Hawke, opened Thursday off-Broadway at Theatre Row. Visually interesting and well-acted, the dark play tells a tragic story with brittle, noirish humor and mockery.

A series of often-mysogynistic scenes crash past in fragments, featuring Hawke as antihero rock musician Clive. “Any story that can be understood is just a badly told story,” says one character blithely, which helps explain the disjointed misadventures of Clive inventively staged by Hawke.

Playwright Jonathan Marc Sherman, who also performs a few roles and plays the piano, claims in a production note that he used the 1922 German version of Brecht’s work via a Google translation. A funny idea but, one hopes, not completely true.

For a portrait of debauched self-indulgence, Hawke has well-cast himself, featuring a wild-haired, punk-rock appearance and manic grin. Clive is allegedly undertaking a search for beauty and meaning in life, but he’s conducting it via complete self-gratification and abandon, primarily by seducing a series of pretty young women and then discarding them like so much trash.

Hawke succeeds at conveying his character’s combination of childlike selfishness combined with adult cruelty, as Clive’s boozing and drugging and lust and treachery send him into a downward spiral of deterioration. While Clive does many despicable things, Hawke also makes him magnetic and at times almost sympathetic. Increasingly despairing, Clive observes, “I always believed in myself but I fear I’m becoming an atheist.”

Brooks Ashmanskas brings a special zest to his roles, which include a cuckold, a showy landlord, a priest (so Clive can mock God) and others. Vincent D’Onofrio gives a solid, appealing performance as Clive’s friend Doc. True to form, Clive eventually screws Doc over, too, as he degenerates into homicide.

If you think the many female characters all look alike, that’s because three women play nearly all of them. Zoe Kazan is especially fragile, yet tenacious and sensual, in her portrayals of two virginal young girls who are stolen by Clive from his friends, then treated like dirt. Stephanie Janssen, Mahira Kakkar, Aaron Krohn and Dana Lyn ably round out the cast; Lyn also provides lovely violin and piano music.

Catherine Zuber’s sexy, punk-inspired costumes and the lighting, sound and music designs, which include instruments mounted on doors, add to an atmosphere of dreaminess and dissonance that envelops this tale of Clive’s self-destruction.

Derek McLane’s spare set design includes a hanging, silvery curtain made of hundreds of twisted beer can pieces, which call to mind Clive’s irretrievably broken soul and all the lives he shattered on his reckless road to ruin.

'Clive' Review by Tari...

MAGICAL MISSTARI TOUR

While I was on grand jury duty, ticket discount offers came pouring in, but I couldn't take the time to look at all of them.  However, when the name Vincent D'Onofrio was in the subject line of a ticket offer, I pounced.  I had no idea he was going to be doing a play with the New Group this season!  After much trial and error of buying a ticket via my iPhone (I need one of those password apps!), I got a discounted ticket to Clive.  Without knowing a thing about it.  Sometimes, crushes can get you into trouble...

After a little more research, I discovered Clive is loosely adapted/based on Brecht's Baal.  Intriguing.  I've never seen a production of Baal.  It was adapted by Jonathan Marc Sherman, whose plays I have enjoyed in the past, and it was directed by Ethan Hawke, whose work I have enjoyed in the past (but not always, if I'm being totally honest).  So, I figured I was in for an interesting evening, no matter what.  But THEN I heard from several friends that the play was, um, perhaps, not quite ready for audience consumption.  Hmmmm.  Oh well, what the heck.  I decided to take a chance.

OK.  So.  Honestly?  This production did not make itself known to me.  I found it mainly to resemble an acting school project.  The cast was enjoying themselves in the extreme, and seemed smug and self-satisfied in their knowledge that they were the cool kids updating Brecht.  I didn't find that so enjoyable.  I know that Brecht didn't really believe in naturalism, or empathizing with character.  OK.  But I don't think 'alienating' the audience by being pretentious and self-indulgent was the alienation effect Brecht was talking about.  Although, if that was Brecht's intent: job well done.  I'm guessing, however (and this is just a guess, I'm not an expert in Brecht or epic theater), that this adaptation didn't quite go far enough.  It used several 'Brechtian' principles, like direct address, and songs, and the speaking of stage directions, in an inconsistent way.  And not in an offputting, theatrical inconsistency, but rather a 'let's throw that in' kind of way that didn't make the piece entirely successful.  And having characters in the insane asylum be the ones to espouse the principles (No emotion!  Just the words!) seemed so cliche.  All I could think was: Symbolism much?  Sigh.  In my opinion, of course.  There were several audience members who seemed quite engaged and committed to what was going on.  

Having said that, I will say that I found Vincent D'Onofrio's acting to be quite good, but I AM predisposed to enjoy his work.  He's an imposing physical presence and he used that to great effect - the juxtaposition of his largeness and the minute detailing of his characterization is intriguing.  Ethan Hawke, just like in Ivanov recently, had to walk across a thin tightrope, playing an antisocial anti-hero, and after awhile, his slacker-ish affect just didn't work for me.  Unless the goal was to turn me off.  Then, I guess, it worked.  He looked great, though.

Actually, everything LOOKED great.  I thought the physical production was very impressive - the set and lights and costumes were terrific, and I thought Ethan Hawke put together some intriguing and attractive stage pictures.  So...I don't know.  Maybe this was the best adaptation of Baal ever done and I just wasn't open enough to see it.  All I know is I felt vaguely intrigued once or twice, but was mainly annoyed throughout.  Smug is never my favorite theatrical attribute.  I think the show opens tomorrow night, so I'm prepared to have my reviewing hat handed to me.  I'm not sure the critic I sat next to last night was having a good time, though.  But I've been wrong before.

Reel Roundtable Interview with Vincent D'Onofrio...

An oldie but goodie... From 2007
Thank you to Jane!

PHOTOS: 'CLIVE' ONSTAGE

PLAYBILL

'Clive' Review by Ted Cornwell

One of the great pleasures of living in NYC is getting to see some of the biggest names in film and television performing on stage from time to time. I’m particularly impressed by the commitment of people such as Ethan Hawke to promoting new and interesting live theater via companies like The New Group. Last weekend, I had the chance to see Hawke (along with Vincent D’Onofrio, and Joe Kazan, et.al.) in a contemporary adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s play Baal, retitled Clive. The protaganist has been transported to 1990s New York, where “Clive,” the title character, is a rock star who’s circling the drain in every sense -- emotionally, morally, and physically. The play is unrelentingly intense and bleak, but also compelling and intoxicating. And Hawke’s fiery performance is something to behold. Where anyone gets the stamina to take on a performance like that is a mystery to me. The show features some live music and inventive staging. But it’s the performances, not just from Hawke but from the rest of the cast as well, that really make it a major event to see. The new script is by Jonathan Marc Sherman, and not being familiar with the original I can’t know how faithful it is to Brecht. But it’s a show that never leaves you losing interest. I left feeling chilled by the long, cold decline of the title character. P.S. I sat in the front row, along side my friends Michael and James. I don’t think I’ve ever been slow close to the stage that I could see every vein and line in the character’s faces before. P.S. Since I haven't been here for a while, I'll add a few notes about recent reading. I finally introduced myself to the work of A.M. Homes, who I heard read at the Cornelia Street Cafe a few weeks back. Her novel, Music for Torching, read like a fusion of Richard Yates and Paul Auster – in a good way. It was dreamlike and provocative throughout, following a suburban marriage that seems to be coming apart at the seems. And recently I've picked up Fay Weldon's Rhode Island Blues, which is reminding me why I've always loved her wit and insight. Thank god she's so prolific, it seems I'll always be able to find something by Weldon that I haven't read before.

'A Fall From Grace' w/Vincent D'Onofrio Hits Tax Credit Roadblocks

KPLR11

ST. LOUIS, MO (KTVI) – A horror film with a budget in the millions and Oscar nominated lead actor is on hold. The movie may be made in St. Louis Missouri if tax credits from the state are approved. They are still waiting for the state to get back to them.

The movie is called, “A Fall From Grace”. According to the Hollywood Reporter the movie will star Oscar nominated actor Tim Roth. Representatives from the film also say Vincent D’Onofrio, Daryl Hannah, and Cedric the Entertainer also have roles in the film. It is being directed by Jennifer Lynch. This is her 5th movie acting as a director.

The movie’s budget would be $10 million dollars according to a representative from the film. If financing is secured it could bring jobs and much needed national exposure to St. Louis. Film makers are still waiting on a letter of intent to be processed by the state of Missouri. The movie has been waiting on the state to respond since November. They say that if they do not get an answer soon they will switch locations for filming. Meaning, St. Louis could lose jobs and a star studded movie and to another city.

The plot of the thriller is about a St. Louis detective played by Tim Roth searching for a serial killer. The burned bodies of young girls are washing ashore on the banks of the Mississippi river. The movie tracks the detective’s decent into darkness to catch the murderer. The closer the detective gets to death, the closer he gets to solving the case.

'Clive' Talkback Screen caps...

HAPPY GROUNDHOG DAY!

PUNXSATAWNEY PHIL DOES NOT SEE HIS SHADOW...SPRING IS ON THE WAY!