Abstract

Theater

The article discusses several plays. It's encouraging to find the avant-garde merging formalist performance technique with social content and taking a shot at accessibility, even if it means resorting to language. Pioneer, a performance/new music theater piece by Paul Dresher Ensemble, combines images, music and text to demythify the official version of the United States' founding and westward expansion. Across town, the American Conservatory Theater, the major regional rep hereabouts, has produced a new translation of French dramatist Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais' The Marriage of Figaro by scriptwriter, Joan Holden. It's been said that Figaro's class criticism brought on the French Revolution, but this production instead stresses the play's feminism, which Holden says has been overlooked. Like Pioneer, Holly Near's song, which she sings to John Bucchino's piano accompaniment in Fire in the Rain. Singer in the Storm, the stage version of her 1990 autobiography, recognizes that history texts and classes don't tell the true story of the United States.