Archive: Arts & Entertainment

The Actor's Workshop of Ithaca offers classes in the Meisner technique, a structured, developmental approach to acting. Now Eliza Van Cort, with her teachers and actors, have created a company to showcase their actors.

Their production of Caryl Churchill's Far Away, at Risley Theatre, demonstrates both the virtues and the limitations of the Meisner work. It's a very abstract script, set in an undiscovered country where people make hats for political prisoners to wear at their executions, and where the revolutionaries argue about the merits of their friends and enemies, the crocodiles, the children, the cows. Vintage Caryl Churchill. I was delighted to have a chance to see it.

The actors are good: Kathryn Russell as concerned elder Harper, Ella Mead-Van Cort as Young Joan, who doesn't understand the revolution, Darryle Johnson as Todd, a hat-maker turned soldier. Ria Burns-Wilder, as the Adult Joan, is particularly strong as she breaks down under the strain of not knowing who she can trust.

Director Amina Omari, however, has produced the show as realism. That requires complex set changes between the hatmaking shop and Harper's home, as well as endless blackouts to change the hats that Joan and Todd are making. Not only does that ruin the pacing of this short piece; it also misses the point. Something as fantastical as Far Away belongs on a unit set, with actors bringing in simple props as needed.

For the prisoners' march, Abby Smith has designed wonderfully astonishing hats, abstract art that towers and wobbles, made of plastic eggs, tinsel, Mondrian-like cardboard, and things I didn't recognize. That's Far Away: bizarre, outlandish, nothing like reality.

 

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