Moments That Have Moved Me
When the bear puppet designed by Julie Taymor swoops into the audience in Andrei Serban’s “The King Stag” (1984) at the American Repertory Theatre in Boston Massachusetts. I was five. It was so scary and so thrilling!
In “The Hills of California” (2024): Laura Donnelly’s entrance to the jukebox playing “Gimme Shelter”; her long shadow arcs across the stage from the threshold of the door, as the turntable revolves and she slowly crosses it — her family home now an alien landscape representing repression, banality and dread.
When the house in Stephen Daldry's ”An Inspector Calls” (1992) is soaked by a torrential rainstorm and, later, tips forward into the audience and blows-up. I clenched the armrests of my chair in fright.
Robert Lepage, at the end of “The Far Side of the Moon” (2001), lies on the stage and is reflected by an angled mirror the height and width of the proscenium. When he begins to roll around it looks as if he is floating away in space. He was breaking the laws of physics in front of eyes!
When – in Annie Baker’s “The Aliens” (2010) – the actor Michael Chernus – playing a grieving slacker – explicates his grief by repeating the word ‘Ladder’ over and over and over for probably two-minutes in real time. The whole audience sobbed along with him.
In the early 2000s, the London-based company Shunt made a piece called “Dance Bear Dance” (2002) in a Bethnal Green railway arch. At a particularly tense moment of the narrative, a company member threw a lever & a wall slid back. What did you see? You saw the audience in a mirror looking back at itself – no it’s not! – It was an entirely different audience! The brain scramble both audiences were feeling was palpable.
In Katie Mitchell’s “The Phoenician Women” (1996) for the Royal Shakespeare Company, everyone was given a spring of lavender as they entered the theatre – a mourning ritual – and the women in the production sung what to me sounded like Balkan ululations and songs to lift the spirits of the dead. My arm hairs stood on end.
“Generations” by Debbie Tucker Green at The Young Vic, directed by Sacha Wares in 2007. A South African choir greeted us as we made our way into the theatre. The entire room was filled with red earth, plywood walls stencilled with street scenes, a thirteen person choir underscoring, and the brightest light as in that country. One of the great moments in theatre was found in a 25 minute play.
When Simon Rusell Beale played “Hamlet” (2000) at the National Theatre, he made every single word and phrase understandable, clear-as-a-bell and smooth as butter. It took no work on the audience’s part – for once you could focus on the story and characters! It’s a magic trick that to this day I have no idea how he accomplished.
In “Hamlet” at The American Repertory Theatre that I saw in 1991, Mark Rylance played The Dane in pyjamas. I had never seen anything like that in my young life!
The all-white set of Marcus Stern’s “Buried Child” – also at The American Repertory Theatre in 1996 – with the snow from the television on-stage, which abutted such weird dirty mystical strange story telling. Then in the final moments, Tilden breaks the whiteness by rising downstage in a field of corn.
The moment in the National Theatre’s production of “Jitney” by August Wilson at the end of the first act when Booster, played by Keith Randolph Smith, screams out in rage about his fucked-up life and missed opportunities for having been in jail and for screwing it up with the son he loves dearly.