March: Out Like a Hunter Colt

March was a break out month for theater going. We began with a deconstruction of Tennessee Williams by the Wooster Group and a revival of his work by the Roundabout, Vieux Carre, and The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore respectively, sandwiched between was HERE and the experimental Feeder: A Love Story (pun intended). We followed those up with Beautiful Burnout and Room by the SITI Company, not finished by a long shot we then saw CSC’s Double Falsehood and finally War Horse at Lincoln Center.

This past month of theater, surely enough to make any Greek proud, was a most intense and delightfully rewarding experience.

War Horse, being the most spectacular effort with special emphasis on the word “spectacle”, is a performance which needs to be seen to be truly explained. Suffice to say it is not beyond my power to describe, yet I would rather you see it for yourself. With such notables in attendance the night we went as Donald Rumsfeld and Betsy Gottbaum and that announcer guy Allan Kalter from the Letterman Show, we certainly were in some high profile company. Rummy sat in the first row center on the aisle. I didn’t notice him until the second act started, but by the end of the play, he was weeping too.

Let me just say this work does not judge or glorify war, but depicts it in all its savage and heroic complexity of moral ambiguity. War is hell for man and beast. Beast proves more praiseworthy than man does by the end.

From our near vantage point we suffered some obscured sight lines, but we were treated to intimate performances by the enormous cast and got to see the wires and woodcraft of some amazing puppets. War Horse will move anyone who loves equestrian arts.

April now begins cool and clear. It is a cruel month, “breeding Lilacs out of the dead land mixing memory and desire.” As Poetry month kicks off hopefully this tragic fire season will come to an end in New York City.

War Horse plays through June.