Boomerang Theatre Company’s Shakespeare and Repertory Productions

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A longtime New York resident, Christian Toth is an account manager with Verso Advertising, Inc., which serves the needs of diverse book publishers, including Harper Collins and Random House. Christian Toth is also an avid thespian who has participated in a number of outdoor Shakespearean productions with the Boomerang Theatre Company in New York. In 2009, he had a part in the Boomerang Theatre Company’s production of The Comedy of Errors.

An off-off-Broadway theatrical company, Boomerang has several programs. In addition to its free summer Shakespeare productions in Central Park, Boomerang produces First Flight, which is composed of workshops and readings that highlight plays in development. The company also offers an indoor repertory season that showcases diverse works, from the classic to the under-appreciated. Boomerang has also had several world and New York City premiers during its history. The Boomerang Shakespeare productions are unique in that they do not require seats or tickets, with audience members simply encouraged to find a comfortable place on the grass near “The Rock” (in the vicinity of the Central Park West and 69th Street entrance). Boomerang’s free production for 2014 is Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

new identity blues

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It gets harder to find new things that are truly exciting but I’ve been lucky with books lately.

Chekhov’s “The Duel and Other Stories” — a Penguin Classics edition I found at a used bookstore — has turned out to be quite a find. He wrote these stories toward the end of his short life. They’re dramatic with dialogue that sounds like it’s spoken by real people. That didn’t surprise me. They deal partly with the middle-class anxieties over money, class and provincialism that I expected based on the plays and the other stories I’ve read.

But there’s more to these stories than I was prepared for. A different kind of depth that surprises and unsettles. It’s comforting, too. It’s like a commiseration. It’s about suffering on the level of one’s basic identity. Characters turn to a new location, a new love, a new way of approaching religion, a new engagement with class issues and charity, even a recurring hallucination, to seek out why they feel and behave as they do and what they can do about it. They kill or nearly kill one another. They insult one another. They make terrible mistakes in the pursuit of truth and happiness. It reminds me of Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and makes me think about what was going on in Russia around this time (1880s-90s).

The one I just finished, “The Black Monk,” happens to end in “the Crimea.” I can’t reflect intelligently on what’s taking place there now but the tensions of identity (Russian/Ukrainian, free/subject, liberated/occupied, democratic/totalitarian) resonate with the tensions of identity in the story (exceptional/commonplace, disordered/gifted, honest/hurtful, disciplined/wild, sensitive/depressed).

At the same time I’ve been reading an article in The New Yorker about Stalin’s daughter and her own pursuit of happiness via numerous marriages, affairs, a defection, leaving her children and losing contact with them, they not forgiving her for the abandonment.

All this Russian around.

Chekhov’s stories in this collection are also full of warmth, humor, entertainment, beauty, music, and love.