Danish delight

>> The Centaur’s secret play revealed and other spring tidings

by AMY BARRATT

As you’ve probably heard, the 2002–03 Centaur season is a cliff-hanger. “Due to contractual obligations,” they cannot announce the title of the final play in their line-up until July 1. They have, however, dropped enough clues in their season flyer to deduce that the play scheduled to open May 8, 2003, is Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. It’s the winner of both the Tony award and London’s Evening Standard Award for best play. It is the play that Ben Brantley of the New York Times called “the most invigorating and ingenious play of ideas in many a year” and that the New Yorker’s John Lahr called “superb.”

Frayn is probably best known as the author of the hilarious backstage comedy Noises Off, but Copenhagen belongs to a whole other genre. In it, Frayn recreates a meeting in the Danish capital between two physicists, Niels Bohr and his former student Werner Heisenberg in 1941. Their work together had opened the way to the atomic bomb, and the two now found themselves on opposite sides of the war. No one but the two of them and, Frayn speculates, Bohr’s wife, know what was discussed on that night. The play has been a huge critical and popular hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and continues to tour.

International flavours

Back to the present, Dinner With Friends opens tonight, April 4, at Centaur. The 2000 Pulitzer prize-winner is by Donald Margulies, who also wrote Collected Stories, which we saw last season at the Saidye starring Miss Uta Hagen. Dinner With Friends is directed by Rosemary Dunsmore, winner of a MECCA and a Best Actress Masque award for her performance in last year’s Wit.

Gordon McCall, the theatre’s artistic director, makes his Centaur acting debut in this show. The cast also includes Steve Adams (Angels in America, Part 2); Linda Smith, who was a memorable Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof some 11(!) years ago; and Danette Mackay (Caucasian Chalk Circle, Scarpone)—the same Danette Mackay who is behind the wildly successful Kiss My Cabaret.

It may be an off-year for the biennial Festival de Théâtre des Ameriques, but artistic director Marie-Hélène Falcon isn’t sitting on her hands, not with all of the juicy experimental theatre out there. Last week she announced the contenders in this year’s mini-FTA, Théâtres du monde:

Daniel MacIvor and Daniel Brooks made such a splash at Usine C last season with In On It that they were invited back to do a residency this spring and create a new piece for Usine C and the FTA. The result is Cul-de-sac, a solo show with MacIvor playing 15 characters.
Endstation Amerika is a radical reinterpretation of A Streetcar Named Desire by a German company, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz.

Genesi, From the Museum of Sleep, is Italian director Romeo Castellucci’s three-act take on the book of Genesis.

Finally, from Belgium, two plays, The Notebook and The Proof, based on a trilogy by Hungarian novelist Agota Kristof. All plays are either in English or supertitled. :

Dinner With Friends runs at the Centaur until May 12, 288-3161
Théâtres du monde runs May 8–18 at Usine C, Théâtre Denise-Pelletier, and the Monument National, 844-2172 or 790-1245