- The Damned
7/21/18 (Sat), New York
An overwrought stage version of the Visconti film by man-of-the-hour Ivo van Hove, the busy avant-garde Belgian director. He’s best known for his minimalist productions, as in the interesting View from the Bridge, but here he’s taken a sharp turn to maximalist.
The saga, which broadly follows the movie plot, revolves around a rich steel manufacturer who has chosen unwisely to deal with the Nazis just as they are coming to power. The intricate story involves betrayal, greed, murder, suicide, political brutality, incest and other pleasantries, only to result in the end in the loss of the family’s steel plants to Hitler’s regime as the nation marches inexorably toward war.
The show was presented not in a normal theater but in a huge hall room in the Park Avenue Armory, with a sprawling stage constructed at one side of the room and raised audience seating on the other. The stage had chairs and a dressing area at one side, where the actors remained visible throughout the show; the main playing area in the middle; and six coffins lining the other side suggesting nastiness ahead that is fully fulfilled. There are huge screens playing videos that are being taken simultaneously by on-stage cameraman (or in one case, filmed inside the coffins). I’m sure there was a point to that, but as it’s much easier to see the gigantic images than the actual actors, we inevitably watch the projections rather than the real thing, making it hard to know just where the director wanted us to turn. The images could be striking, such as the creepy images of the desperate child and others lying inside the coffins, where they have been stuffed alive at various points and left to die. The audience itself is projected in the videos several times, making us – victims? perpetrators? Beats me.
The story, for all its excesses, is straightforward enough, though something felt missing; I wish now that I had seen the film, which may have filled in the blanks. The violence felt over the top by any measure, eventually dulling its effect, and other touches like frontal nudity and a startling scene of tarring-and-feathering had no evident justification. (A friend says the latter is explained in the film, but that doesn’t excuse it here.) At one point, the brutal murder of two men is represented by dousing them with buckets of red liquid, reminding me of a similar tactic in Bridge, though it did lead to an arresting ending.
I suppose the expressionist production style matches the time period, and it’s certainly memorable, if that’s the idea. But most of the antics seem designed to shock rather than illuminate. I’m not sure that Visconti is well served here. It will be interesting to see whether the minimalist or maximalist van Hove shows up for his next production, the musical West Side Story (yes, you read that right). I haven’t the slightest idea what to expect.
sekenbanashi 