The Past Through the Prism of the Present
June 5, 2007 - 10:48 — Mallory Jensen
In Scenes from an Execution, Howard Barker recreates the contentious, inspired world of artistic Venice in the 1570s, populating a rich historical landscape with fictional painters and patrons. But the themes and emotions the play can arouse in an audience today, as in QED Productions’ current revival, deftly directed by Zander Teller, pulse as though modern, and almost factual.
The characters’ tangled relationships and loyalties, portrayed with intensity by the leading actors, not only draw you into the individual struggles that shape them and their world, but demand your engagement from start to finish with the intellectual and moral issues from which those struggles are born.
But back to the beginning, when the series of “catastrophes” (to use the word Barker does for his work, which he has referred to as a “
Theatre of Catastrophe”) has yet to unfold and all we know is that one of the most famous painters in 16th century Venice is a woman, Galactia (played with wit and vigor by Elena McGhee), and she has been commissioned by the city-state’s Doge to paint a massive victory canvas of the recent Battle of Lepanto, a huge and bloody naval battle in which the short-lived Holy League defeated the Ottoman Empire. Being a woman of unusual (especially for her era) independence of mind and spirit, Galactia naturally has no intention of painting a typical war-glorifying scene: she intends to show the battle and its fleshly consequences as realistically (i.e., gruesomely) as possible, and naturally this infuriates everyone from the Doge through Galactia’s daughters.
Barker’s approach can be didactic and preachy; one device he uses is to have an art critic – Rivera, the other strong, intelligent woman in the city, given an elegant presence by Julia Beardsley O’Brien – walk onstage where the action is frozen and describe and analyze it as a supposed preparatory painting by Galactia, and he also tends to spell out the philosophical issues at hand a bit too explicitly in the dialogue. Fortunately, the actors’ lively performances mostly ameliorate this shortcoming, so that even though you may be listening to Galactia lay out her rationale to her daughters, who are lesser creatures than she, McGhee’s delivery, punctuated with a laugh that manages to be carefree and sharp at once, makes the explicitness of the wording weigh less; similarly with the weak Doge, whose overwritten litany of complaints and demands is more palatable via Micah Freedman’s air of nervous pomposity.
Thus truths about life and art that might come across as worn seem more like insight.
As Galactia’s work on the canvas progresses and her supporters progressively desert her because of her refusal to change her approach for anything, not to advance women’s position in art, as her daughters (minor painters themselves) wish, nor to help the Doge, who has been a good patron to artists but has a tenuous hold on power, nor to give herself glory or even to save herself when it becomes clear that her decisions have angered the powerful.
One is reminded more than once, as she is excoriated for putting war’s brutal face on display, undisguised, of the circumstances of our own war – the visceral power of the photos from Abu Ghraib, the government’s ban on photos of coffins – and so of the continuing importance, and paucity, of people with Galactia’s conviction and determination. We have our lapdog media, Venice had plenty of painters like Galactia’s married lover Carpeta, who Mick O’Brien makes an appropriately spineless, and minor in every sense of the word, religious painter.
But for all the ire Galactia provokes in those around her and those who find her painting offensive, and for all the indications that the story is headed toward a typical, theatrical bad ending for the truth-teller, Barker doesn’t let them, or us, off that easily. Much as Galactia prides herself on poking the powerful in the eyes and would love to be a martyr for her art, the haunting black nights she spends in a dank prison cell, where McGhee shows her becoming more unhinged by the moment, make her see her work and purpose differently, much as the Doge is helped by Rivera to understand the value of Galactia’s painting and even independent-minded art in general. Consequently, he relents, and Galactia, in the play’s final minutes, performed very movingly by the cast here, witnesses the full effect her work has on viewers, and seeing it change them visibly changes her.
Neil Becker’s set is austere – though Joe Novak’s dramatic lighting adds a lot to build up the space –
and Barker didn’t intend for the audience to see a real painting being produced onstage, but over the course of the scenes here, one can almost feel the images Galactia is setting to canvas burned into the blank air as she goes. Barker’s meditations on art and freedom in this play, which is thought provoking on many levels, take on new life in this wrenching production. The questions the actors bring to life in the made-up words of fictional Venetians resonate deeply in 2007 and are sure to stay with you well after you leave the theatre.
– Mallory Jensen
Scenes from an Execution runs through June 10 at the Hudson Guild Theatre, 441 West 26th St., NYC.
http://culturecatch.com/theater/scenes-from-an-executionnytheatre.com review
Martin Denton · July 6, 2008
Why didn't I feel engaged by Potomac Theatre Project's revival of Howard Barker's Scenes from an Execution? The subject matter is important and timely and is presented by the author the way one wishes to see serious issues presented on stage, which is to say as the give-and-take discourse of intelligent and articulate characters.
The subject is the freedom of artists in a so-called democracy. Barker sets his play in a fictionalized version of 16th century Venice, which (in the play, anyway) regards itself as a democratic state. The Doge of Venice, Urgentino, has commissioned a maverick painter named Galactia to paint a huge canvas (1000 square feet!) on the Battle of Lepanto. He thinks she knows—and indeed, she does know—that her government expects something that will celebrate Venice's victory in this battle, something that will glorify her country's dominion and values and so on. But she paints something else nevertheless: she says she wants to paint the truth, and for her the truth is that this battle was horrible and bloody and awful. She makes the Venetian admiral in command of the fleet—Urgentino's brother, Suffici—into a hard-hearted, callous wretch. She makes the carnage, to use a word that crops up more than once in the play, coarse.
She gets into trouble, not surprisingly: most of the play's second act depicts her inquisition at the hands of the Doge and one of his chief ministers, a Cardinal named Ostensible, and then her imprisonment and subsequent, um, rehabilitation. Barker makes the ethical/moral questions inherent in his story more and more complicated and ambiguous as the drama unfolds, and puts a number of speeches in the mouths of his characters that are entirely contradictory yet utterly unimpeachable.
It certainly sounds like the recipe for a challenging and exhilarating couple of hours of theatre....and yet, it left me cold, and I've been trying to figure out the reason. I've come up with a few possibilities. First and probably foremost, the play itself IS cold. At least in Jan Maxwell's characterization, Galactia is an oddly passionless artist: I wondered how a person capable of painting something that (everyone in the play tells us) is the kind of life-changing work of art that, say, Guernica was could herself be so lacking in fire and depth. Barker gives Galactia a love/hate relationship with a fellow painter named Carpeta, but Maxwell and David Barlow set off no sparks here; her rejections and overtures register as nothing more than shallow caprice.
The names of the characters suggest that Barker is writing an allegory rather than something to be taken at face value, yet director Robert Romagnoli stages the piece naturalistically, albeit anachronistically (the women wear period gowns but the men's garb feels more contemporary; a moment when Carpeta zips up his trousers is particularly jarring).
And the performances here are wildly uneven. Maxwell still seemed to be struggling with some of her lines, and as noted shows little of the complexity that I imagine Galactia must possess. Barlow (Carpeta) and Alex Draper (Urgentino) never come across as her equals, which is problematic; only Robert Zukerman as Suffici and Timothy Deenihan as Ostensible accomplish that. Just one performance actually moved me in Scenes from an Execution: Willie Orbison's, near the end of the first act, as a sailor who happens to glimpse the still-in-process painting of the Battle of Lepanto. His face—rapt, wracked—displays the immensity of what Galactia is presumably communicating in her work; something so nakedly, indisputably honest that it would turn a democracy upside-down for what it revealed about it.
http://www.nytheatre.com/nytheatre/showpage.php?t=scen7009
By FRANK SCHECK
Rating: 
Last updated: 7:39 am
July 8, 2008
Posted: 4:09 am
July 8, 2008
WAR, love and more are treated in deceptively lighthearted fashion in "Scenes From an Execution," Howard Barker's play about a sexually liberated sixth-century Venetian artist who runs afoul of the authorities.
That (fictional) artist is Galactia (the terrific Jan Maxwell), a high-spirited woman whose many lovers include a rival painter named Carpeta (David Barlow).
Commissioned to render a massive painting commemorating the city's recent naval victory, Galatica instead uses her 1,000-square-foot canvas to depict the horrors of war.
Needless to say, this doesn't sit well with the Doge (Alex Draper) or Cardinal (Timothy Deenihan), who declares, "I despise artists, and that's why I'm perfectly qualified to sit on this committee!"
And so Galactia gets thrown into a dungeon. It's only through the intervention of an enlightened critic (no, that's not an oxymoron) that her painting isn't destroyed.
While playwright Barker has much to say about the role of artists in society and sexual double standards, "Scenes" is a talky, overly self-conscious affair.
From its cutesy character names - Galactia's daughters are named Supporta and Dementia - to such bits as the wounded veteran walking around with an arrow stuck in his head, the play sacrifices dramatic intensity in favor of low comedy.
Still, its messages ring true and are delivered in reasonably effective fashion in director Richard Romagnoli's well-acted production, which includes a cast of both professionals and students from Vermont's Middlebury College.
Best of all, not surprisingly, is Maxwell, who is enthralling as the defiantly sexual and free-thinking artist.
"Scenes," written in 1985 and previously seen here in a 1996 production, is being performed in repertory by the politically minded Potomac Theatre Project along with the one-act plays "Crave" by Sarah Kane and "Somewhere in the Pacific" by Neal Bell.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/07082008/entertainment/theater/venetians_blind_to_merits_of_political_a_119014.htm
Scenes From An Execution probes the relationship between art and power
CFA production is Boston-area premiere of Howard Barker’s epic play
By Brian Fitzgerald
CFA Associate Professor Paula Langton plays Galactia in Scenes from an Execution. Photo by Stratton McCrady
Scenes from an Execution is an epic about a young woman painter in renaissance Venice. But the play has extraordinary relevance for today’s audience, says director Jim Petosa, because it centers on a conflict between an artist’s need to be true to herself and the demands of her patron. The play is being presented by the College of Fine Arts during the next two weekends at the Boston Center for the Arts.
The painter, Galactia, is determined to depict with her brush the true brutality of a naval sea battle, clashing with the political requirements of the fresco desired by the Venetian authorities who have commissioned the work, according to Petosa, a CFA professor and director of the school of theatre.
The Venetian state wants Galactia, played by Paula Langton, a CFA assistant professor, to memorialize and triumphalize in a painting the battle of Lepanto, “in which many Venetians lost their lives in a hapless mission of occupation over the Turks,” says Petosa, But the bold artist is “single-minded in the pursuit of the truth” in her work.
Petosa points out that Langton is well suited for the part of Galactia — and as a teacher, “Paula possesses that unique combination of skill, instinct, and visceral connection to her material that makes the role a natural for her,” he says. “As a school, we have come to recognize that some of the best teaching occurs when we directly collaborate with our students. Paula’s work on this play, and the remarkable student performances that are supporting her, is a wonderful example of the effectiveness of that approach.”
Students appreciate Petosa’s style as well. “He’s incredibly articulate,” says Therese Barbato (CFA’06), who plays Galactia’s daughter Supporta. “His vision for the characters is crisp. There’s no ambiguity.”
Scenes from an Execution, written by British playwright Howard Barker in 1984, will be performed on Friday, December 9, at 8 p.m., Saturday, December 10, at 8 p.m., and Sunday, December 11, at 2 p.m., at the Calderwood Pavilion’s Wimberly Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont St. There will also be performances December 15 to 18 (click here for the complete list of performances and times).
Tickets for Scenes from an Execution are $10 for the general public and $8 for BU alumni, students, and senior citizens. Members of the BU community can receive one free ticket (subject to availability) with BU ID at the door on the day of the performance. To order tickets, call 617-933-8600 or visit http://www.bostontheatrescene.com/.
Scenes From an Execution kills in box office
Written by Howard Barker, Scenes from an Execution combines extremely dense text with profound visual imagery, which Director Jim Peck and the rest of the company execute with clarity and precision.
Scenes is set in Renaissance-era Venice shortly after the devastating battle of Le Panto and is a discourse about art’s role in shaping the minds of the public. The main character, Galactia, portrayed by Actor-in-Residence Devon Allen, is selected by the state of Venice to create a work of art that will instill the spirit of victory in the Venetian citizens. Galactia, however, morally wrestles with this commission and believes that she should show the truth of the battle through her painting.
Under the direction of Jim Peck, Professor of Theatre, Scenes aims to enlighten the audience about the reality of war and its psychological effects on society. Much of the play features an intense dialogue concerning this issue between such varying groups as artists, soldiers and government officials, each of which have their separate opinions. Through the different perspectives of these three groups, the audience is exposed to the implicit desires and moral dilemmas of the characters.
Allen’s bold portrayal of Galactia not only carried the performance, but also revealed the vulnerability of Barker’s characters. Galactia’s lover, Carpeta, played by Nick Thompson-Miller ’04, explores his own art, morals and love for Galactia through an immense personal struggle conveyed by Thompson-Miller with bravado. Carpeta’s internal struggle echoes Galactia’s search truth.
Representing the government, Justin Brehm ’05, plays Urgentino with humor and charm. Urgentino’s own struggle between life and art drives much of the action of the play and adds an influential force over the lives of Galactia and Carpeta.
The rest of the large ensemble also gave an excellent performance that added depth and humanity to this stimulating work. Each character was unique and brought it’s individuality to the performance.
Scenes from an Execution runs through Nov. 23 in the Studio Theatre, located in Trexler Pavilion.
http://media.www.muhlenbergweekly.com/media/storage/paper300/news/2003/11/20/Life/Scenes.From.An.Execution.Kills.In.Box.Office-563279.shtml
