Big Love
Opening Night: February 5, 2015
Closing: March 15, 2015
Theater: Signature Theatre
Fifty brides flee their fifty grooms and seek refuge in an Italian villa in this modern re-making of one of the world’s oldest plays, The Danaids by Aeschylus. Mayhem ensues, complete with grooms in flight suits, women throwing themselves to the ground, occasional pop songs and romantic dances – even a bride falling in love. Reuniting Signature’s 2007-08 Playwright-in-Residence Charles Mee with his longtime collaborator Tina Landau, Big Love is a colossal, poetic work that explores the hunger for independence, the burden of tradition, and the shape and size of love.
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February 23, 2015
They’re bouncing off the walls in Tina Landau’s frenzied revival of Big Love, Charles Mee’s 2000 play of things martial and marital according to Aeschylus. They’re also dangling from ropes and jumping on trampolines and rolling on the floor and fighting with tooth, claw, knives and slices of wedding cake. Well, as the song says, that’s amore. Actually, that Dean Martin hit isn’t heard in Big Love, which opened on Monday night at the Pershing Square Signature Center.But a whole lot of other tunes — pop and classical — are: “You Don’t Own Me” (immortalized by Lesley Gore), Michael Jackson’s “Bad,” Pachelbel’s Canon, Handel’s Largo, the “come to the window” aria from Mozart’s Don Giovanni and a few less obvious choices. Love, it seems, is a mixtape of clichés in the world of Mr. Mee, whose plays often suggest a collagist who’s gone crazy with the scissors. He has been praised and dissed for riffing wild on venerable works, like Euripides’ The Trojan Women and Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, with what usually registers more as hellbent madness than discernible method.
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