You will dig this show I just saw if you, like me, have cremative diffuifulties, like with writing n’ schtuff…

Or like you can’t like articulate yourself good enough to get a job…

Or you can’t break it off with that not-so-special someone…

Or you are being stingy with your pussy/cock and not giving your Once Significant Other any pleasure thereby punishing he/she for saving you from being a self-destructive, fake-monogamous asshole…

Or you have an addiction to ellipses…

Or you can’t not drink when free booze is presented to you at a party at Tom Fruin’s studio or Whole Foods or when you’re subletting your friend’s apartment in Paris and you find a half-filled bottle of wine…. or vinegar… whatever…

Or you have serious Blog Block… as I do… or rather as I did.  I did have it.  And now I don’t, I mean I’m still mentally stuttering… but I am writing.  I am writing on this gay-ass Blog!  I like things in my butt!  Does that make me gay!?!  Who cares?  I’m in love with the world and my wife, Kat!!!  Yeah, I am married!!! (Sorry for not telling you Mom but I went off my meds.)

In fact, I am doing a lot of things that I have been putting off.  Today I took a shower and I actually thought about maybe considering thinking about doing my 2006 taxes. I credit the transformative power of The Success of Failure (or The Failure of Success) which opens at St. Anne’s tomorrow.

I thought (as in “I am not thinking anymore”) that the first half of this show was dreck… I mean top of the line dreck, like the most advanced beautifully choreographed crap you will ever see outside of Euro-Disney.   The designers of the show are the most sought after on Bway and that is NOT because Jane Fonda made them dress up like scientists to perform Bunraku-prop manipulation and video Foley… Hopkins did!!!  And thank Saint Martin of Tours for her creative soul!

To translate from Ivan Bellman speak, if you don’t appreciate the first half of this performance then STOP TALKING TO YOURSELF and PAY ATTENTION!  It is not the show! It is YOU!!!  You don’t have to be a closet drinker or Experimental Theater Fag to appreciate it. I might help but it is not required.  The only thing that is required is that you go! Like Now!

It’s great.

And in the second-half you watch Cindy channel all sorts of demons and dead rockstars… like when she gestured to her crotch I swear I was watching Patti Smith.  Or maybe it was Michael Jackson.  Whatever.

Really good. Very moving.  I am getting choked up just thinking about it.

OK.

Gotta go.

So do you.

Love,
IAN BELTON writing as IVAN BELLMAN

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The Wooster Group Benefit last Friday was a great time. Fab people, fun drinks, great DJ and more!! Thanks to my friend Alexis we’ve got some great photos of the party - with more to come! Here’s a few to start – and check her photo set on flickr.

Kim Whitener and Susan Feldman

Scott Shepherd & Friends

AndrewAndrew

Some Girl's Sexy Back

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Okay I was going to do this in a logical way, starting with the first show and moving on up in time to this afternoon (Sunday). But I can’t do it that way because I have been moved to tears and almost to speechlessness by the extraordinary, astonishing, near-perfect masterpiece that is Aya Ogawa’s Oph3lia.

I have been so busy that I hadn’t read any of the reviews, hadn’t talked to anyone about the show, I knew nothing about it except the brief excerpt I saw at HERE maybe a year or so ago. So I came into to theater blind, for all intents and purposes, with no expectations. It was my first chance to see the newly renovated HERE, which is absolutely magnificent. Kudos to Kristin, Kim, Katy, Karina, Jose & all the other countless staff members, volunteers, donors and artists who have worked so hard for so long. The space is beautiful and has basically leapfrogged over all the other downtown theaters. HERE is now, physically, the best theater-going experience downtown. Without a doubt.

So, I was already primed and excited going into the show. Little did I know what was to come. Ostensibly three disparate stories of displacement, isolation and disconnection expose the cultural crises that pervade our global society, Oph3lia is, in my opinion, one story, the same story, told through different characters in different places in different times. (I’m sorry, Claudia, but I think you missed it on this one, there is nothing clumsy or forced in this show.)

Unfortunately I do not have the critical or writerly gifts to do justice to this show. It was seamless and complete, moving, surreal, meticulous, emotionally powerful, beautifully written and artfully staged, scored and directed. Ogawa achieves a startling aesthetic unity, allowing the audience to connect the various narrative elements in many different and meaningful ways. She creates a visceral experience of Ophelia, the entire piece is Ophelia, is the experience of being in the world misunderstood, with no voice, beautiful, immutable, simultaneously object and subject.

The actors are all fantastic, the sound design is impeccable, the lighting and set… I really don’t know how to describe this show other than to say it is the most extraordinarily gratifying work of theater I have seen in a long, long time. I can hardly remember the last time I left a theater with that deep, deep feeling of having been “experienced” to quote Hendrix. That aesthetic arrest, that sensation of being shaken and moved, to being somehow transformed, to have my mind and heart simultaneously engaged.

Oph3lia pulled together so many things people talk about – globalization, technology, post-modern identity, art vs. commerce, alienation of modern society, the challenges of human interaction and intimacy, the search for connection and meaning – and wove them into this beautiful, heart-breaking, hilarious, world-unto-itself. You MUST GO SEE THIS SHOW! This show should travel around the world, playing at every international festival, at Shakespeare festivals, pretty much everywhere. I’m still reeling. I think I’m going to take a break from seeing shows for awhile because I don’t want to ruin the extraordinary feeling I have.

The rest of my weekend, including a solo Hamlet at TerraNova’s SOLOnova festival, Macbeth at St. Ann’s, Builder’s Association at The Kitchen and more….after the jump.

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