North Atlantic
Opening Night: March 23, 2010
Closing: April 25, 2010
Theater: Jerome Robbins Theatre
North Atlantic is a satiric look at the role of the military and the growing influence of technology in American culture during the late Cold War period, after Vietnam and before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The work follows an international peacekeeping force on an aircraft carrier in the North Atlantic, tracing the cultural and sexual dynamics that rise to the fore as they carry out their top-secret mission.
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March 24, 2010
Lust has been known to make many a hearty serviceman burst into song, or so the American musical tells us. But there are lots of ways for a soldier, sailor or Marine to express the sentiment that there is nothing like a dame — to borrow a lyric from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific” — and not all of them are pretty. Why, just listen to what the boys are singing in a little show 20-some blocks south of where “South Pacific” is enjoying a long-running revival at Lincoln Center.
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March 24, 2010
You won’t spend a microsecond of the Wooster Group’s North Atlantic, now at the Jerome Robbins Theatre at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, in a state of boredom, but perplexity — of the pleasurable, anything-could-happen kind — is pretty much guaranteed. A whole lot of this play, including its many campy musical interludes, is fairly incomprehensible.
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March 25, 2010
Some historians of the modern American surveillance state identify 1983 as the year it all started, with the terrorist bombing in Beirut that killed 241 Marines. Then-national security advisor John Poindexter instituted a process of exhaustive data-mining to anticipate future attacks. By a strange coincidence, 1983 is also the year the Wooster Group started developing James Strahs’s metanoir Cold War satire, North Atlantic. Like Poindexter (but infinitely cooler), director Elizabeth LeCompte and her merry band of avant-garde troupers are happiest wallowing in reams of assorted data.
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March 23, 2010
Why is it that when a company like the Roundabout produces the same old theatrical warhorses they get nailed, while the avant-garde Wooster Group can repeatedly trot out its vintage pieces with the explanation that they’re "revisiting" them and garner hosannas? Such is likely to be the case with "North Atlantic," receiving its third New York production since its 1984 premiere. Considering that it’s not even one of the company’s best works, the repetition is puzzling.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 25, 2010
The Cold War is a pretense for hot sex in The Wooster Group’s latest revival of North Atlantic, which was first staged back in 1983. Set aboard a unisex aircraft carrier off the Dutch coast that same year, James Strahs’s opaque play concerns a group of Navy intelligence officers tasked with decrypting Cold War communications. But that’s just a cover; their real mission is finding a way to release their nuclear-charged sexual frustration. And since this is showbiz, albeit of the avant-garde variety, what better way to blow off steam than through elaborate song and dance numbers? (The show’s title is itself a winking nod to Rogers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific.)
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