Review: “LOU”

An intimate biopic about Lou Salome, one of the first scholars of the psychology of female sexuality, told by the all-female cast of six.   

Lou Salome was a late 19^th - early 20th century philosopher, writer and psychoanalyst. Although she wrote more than a dozen novels as well as numerous plays and essays, her work is little known. Her personal life, on the other hand, is known much better, but mostly in relation to the famous males with whom she was acquainted, friends and in relationships. Among these men were Frederic Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke and Sigmund Freud.

photo by Jody Christopherson

The debut play LOU by Haley Rice reclaims the story of Salome, putting the thinker’s brilliant mind and charismatic personality in the center of the picture. Kate Moore Heaney directs the all-female cast of six with fiery Mieko Gavia in the title role. To put it bluntly, ladies kick ass.

It is difficult to imagine anybody else but Gavia play the Russian born German philosopher. She made Lou appear strong-willed and sharp-tongued, equally successful at philosophical sparing and resisting the attempts of many men to court her. Although historians disagree on the number of suitors, Lou possessed the hearts of quite a few famous men of the century.    

You have probably seen a photograph by Jules Bonnet, depicting Lou Andreas-Salomé, Paul Rée and Frederic Nietzsche in 1882. Salome is holding a whip; Ree and Nietzsche are posing by the horse wagon against a mountain landscape background in the photographer’s studio. This image became an emblem of the intellectual ménage-a-trois between Salome, Ree and Nietzsche and an illustration to many rumors about the nature of this union.

Rice avoids going thorough the dirty laundry of the philosophical circle. She depicts the trio as an intellectual commune, bursting at the seams by their suppressed desires. Watching Lou putting Ree and Nietzsche in their place, like schoolboys, is comical. Yet it is scary that marriage was the only legitimate form of intellectual and emotional union with a woman, as seen by even progressive men of the time. Rice puts three marriage proposal scenes in a row, one of them romantic, one of them hilarious and another one being uncomfortably chilling.      

Although the play tends to be sentimental and even melodramatic when it comes to Lou’s relationship with men, it has its fair share of truly empowering moments and some good laughs. Olivia Jampol playing Friedrich Andreas, a linguistic scholar and Lou’s partner in a celibate marriage, makes the audience roar with laughter by just dropping a couple of words here and there in the very first scene we meet the character. Needless to say, every following appearance of Andreas is comedic. Jampol is equally successful as Paul Ree.

The all-female ethnically diverse cast feels so organic that I didn’t even see the need to comment on this. Maybe we already arrived at the age of the total acceptance on stage? Theatre 4the People, which produced LOU, totally made me feel this way.

LOU reclaims history by looking back through the female perspective yet avoids loud political statement, and this is the beauty of it. It is first a biography of the brilliant Lou Salome, her pictures, letters and other historical documents hanging down from the ceiling. Besides the archival materials sprinkled around, the set design by Marisa Kaugars consists only of a heavy desk filled with books.

Salome spent most of her life fighting against the prejudices of the patriarchal society and redefining female sexuality, both through her work and personal life. Books, letters and photographs with different men seem like an appropriate aftermath of the philosopher’s life. Everything else is fantasy and I just happened to like this particular one.         

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LOU runs at The Paradise Factory, 64 East 4th Street, through June 3rd. The running time is 2 hours with one intermission. Performances are Tuesday through Saturday at 8:00pm; Saturday and Sunday at 3:00pm. Tickets are $25 and are available at http://lousalome.brownpapertickets.com or by calling 1-800-838-3006. A limited number of pay-what-you-can tickets will be reserved for every performance, in an attempt to keep theatre accessible to all.

LOU is written by Haley Rice. It is directed by Kate Moore Heaney, produced by Theatre 4the Pepole. Costume Design by Katja Andreiev, Sound Design by Almeda Beynon, Lighting Design by Becky Heisler, Set Design by Marisa Kaugars.

The cast is Mieko Gavia, Natasha Hakata, Erika Phoebus, Jenny Leona, Olivia Jampol, and Valeria Avina.

Review: “Vanity Fair”

What does a girl need to do in order to succeed in life and fulfill her desire for love and prosperity? In the middle of the 19th century, when William Thackeray wrote Vanity Fair, a lady had only two ways to get a lucky ticket; inheritance or marriage. In her new adaptation of the British novel, Kate Hamill revisits the dark times of feminism, and does it with much style and joy.

photo by Russ Rowland

Hamill effortlessly tames a 900-page behemoth of a novel and neatly packs it into a show just under three hours. Eric Tucker directs seven actors playing all the parts. The emerald jewelry box of a stage, designed by Sandra Goldmark, glows like a carnival with dozens of lamps on the walls. The heavy burgundy curtain on the oval hoop swings around to introduce chapters from the lives of two friends, Rebecca (Becky) Sharp (Kate Hamill) and Amelia (Emmy) Sedley (Joey Parsons).

As Becky and Emmy graduate from an all-girl school, we can only wonder how such an unlikely friendship between a penniless orphan and a high society lady could happen. Besides coming from different classes, the two girls couldn’t be more different in their temperaments. Rebecca, true to her last name, is poignant and persistent in her goal to make it into high society. Fueled by playfulness and a great deal of irony as portrayed by Hamill, she shamelessly flirts with every single wealthy man she encounters. Amelia, contrarily, is dreamy and obedient. Parsons wins your heart immediately with elegance and a charming smile.

A carousel of hopes and misfortunes spins around the two women, with five remaining men of the cast each playing multiple parts. Rapid changing of costumes, at times consisting only of a hat, a wig or a skirt, is reminiscent of a carnival and evokes the meta- theatre present in the Thackeray’s novel itself.

Although the play lost its framing of a puppet show, Hamill added a character of a Manager (Zachary Fine), dressed in a modern attire. The stage Manager addresses the audience directly mixing up his moral remarks with theater jokes, and occasionally shames Rebecca for being too indiscreet in her husband-hunt.

Fine plays the Manager with a hint of snobbery and melancholic tiredness, the same qualities he brings to two characters he plays in Miss Sharp’s story, old made Matilda Crawley and Lord Steyne. Fine is faithful to the estranged approach to the characters he plays and never fully takes off the hat of a storyteller. This reduces the vulgarity of a long frat sequence involving Matilda and makes Lord Steyne appear more evil.  

Debargo Sanyal shows another example of a very stylized performance, although I found the amount that he grimaces excessive. There is an aftertaste of unkind mockery in the way Sanyal plays his parts, which the production managed to avoid otherwise. Though there are some playful jabs at 19th century romanticism. For instance, every time somebody is about to faint, some modern pop tune kicks in and the entire company dances for some time. And they fainted often in the 19th century!     

Even if you think that the Macarena set to a waltz is not your cup of tea, there are plenty more elegant ways to revive the classics that the director, Eric Tucker, explores. Dynamic staging, playing with rhythm, scenes with double dialogue, the Vanity Fair never stops its breathtaking spinning. Come for a ride while you still have a chance.         

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Vanity Fair runs at The Pearl Theatre, 555 West 42nd Street, through May 27. The running time is 2 hours 45 minutes with one intermission. Performances are Tuesdays at 7:00pm; Wednesdays at 2:00pm; Thursdays at 7:00pm; Fridays at 8:00pm; Saturdays at 2:00pm and 8:00pm; and Sundays at 2:00pm and 7:00pm. Tickets are $59-$79, and are available at pearltheatre.org or by calling 212-563-9261. 

Vanity Fair is written by Kate Hamill, and adapted from the novel by William Thackeray of the same name. Directed by Eric Tucker. Set Design is by Sandra Goldmark. Lighting Design is by Seth Reiser. Sound Design is by Matthew Fischer. Costume Design is by Valérie Thérèse Bart. Katherine Whitney is the Production Stage Manager. 

The cast is Kate Hamill, Joey Parsons, Brad Heberlee, Zachary Fine, Tom O’Keefe, Ryan Quinn, and Debargo Sanyal.