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Autor Thomas Klein
Copyright Berliner Zeitung
Das CSI-Konzept ist nicht kaputt zu kriegen: Für die RTL-Gruppe ist es ein steter Quotenbringer, selbst Wiederholungen sorgen für solide Zahlen. Im Herbst 2001 hatte Vox die erste Staffel gesendet, im RTL-Hauptprogramm läuft “CSI -Den Tätern auf der Spur” seit 2006, auf den Erfolg des Wissenschaftskrimi-Originals folgten zahllose Ableger und freche Kopien auch im deutschen Fernsehen von “Bones” über “Navy CIS” und “Dr. House” bis zum “Mentalist.” Der CSI-Komplex -übernatürliche Beobachtungsgabe und modernste Wissenschaft sowie eine hundertprozentige Aufklärungsquote -hat das Serien-Fernsehen über weite Strecken zur Monokultur gemacht. Deutsche Produktionen mühten sich, Anschluss an die Importe zu finden, selbst “Tatort”-Kommissare verbringen heute überraschend viel Zeit in der Gerichtsmedizin.
Das kann man in vielen Fällen als pure Trittbrettfahrerei verstehen und den CSI-Serien eine spürbare Verrohung des Fernsehens und der Zuschauer vorwerfen: Früher war Blut eine Pfütze und ein Mordopfer ein abgedeckter Körper, heute werden ausladend Spritz-Muster analysiert, Gewaltanwendungen nachgestellt und im Detail vorgeführt.
Würde des Menschen, hier meist ein zerlegter oder zerfallender Kadaver, ist bei der TV-Obduktion wenig übrig. Das mag realistisch sein, doch der Wechselschritt zwischen überdeutlicher Darstellung und quasi-wissenschaftlicher Verfremdung ist immer etwas kokett. Beim Ur-CSI wirkte das nie so brutal oder zynisch, weil in Las Vegas sympathische Leute mit ganz eigenen Problemen arbeiten. Ihre Themen sind Spielsucht und Mafia-Verwandtschaft, ein freundlicher Wettbewerb untereinander und ein hartes Gerangel mit den Kollegen der Tagschicht sind ebenso an der Tagesordnung wie politischer Druck von oben und Ermittlungen zwischen Anteilnahme und Faktenlage. Im Mittelpunkt des Teams steht Doktor Gil Grissom (William Petersen): Vaterfigur und forensischer Entomologe, immer freundlich, etwas vereinsamt. Grissom kann sich für auch obskurste Aspekte eines Falls begeistern und findet oft so zur Lösung, sein Motto lautet: Folgt den Beweisen. Ein nennenswertes Privatleben hat er nicht -die Beziehung zur Mitarbeiterin Sara Sidle (Jorja Fox) endete
eher traurig.
Doch jetzt muss Gil Grissom gehen. RTL hat das wenig elegant gelöst: Die heutige Folge “Abschied eines Ermittlers” ist zweiter Teil eines Doppels, das vergangene Woche von der Pilotfolge der eher bescheidenen “Knight Rider”-Neuauflage unterbrochen wurde. Wenig Trommelwirbel für Grissoms Abgang. Aber das passt zum RTL-Umgang mit dem Quotenbringer -der Sender vermengt munter neue Folgen und Wiederholungen und unterbricht ohne Not Staffeln. Die Zuschauerzahlen stimmen ja sowieso.
Bei CSI ändert sich auf jeden Fall der Tonfall, wenn Grissom dem eher eisigen Dr. Langston (Laurence Fishburne) weicht. Die CSI-Ableger haben gezeigt, dass der Chef die Serie macht, doch nun fehlt Grissom als sympathisches Original: Die Serie geht zwar weiter, aber irgendwie ist CSI auch vorbei.
CSI -Den Tätern auf der Spur: Abschied
eines Ermittlers, 21.15 Uhr, RTL
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Good news for the Chicago theatre scene — the newest member to Steppenwolf Theatre’s ensemble is “CSI” actor William Petersen. Petersen is currently appearing in Steppenwolf’s “Dublin Carol,” and joining the ensemble means it won’t be his last time on that stage.
Petersen has already wrapped filming his final shows as Gil Grissom on “CSI” (his last episode airs Jan. 15) but in this Chicago Sun-Times interview Petersen said he could pop up on the show in the future) and he’s making a return to Chicago theatre. In July, he’ll appear in Victory Garden Theatre’s “Blackbird,” a real-time account of the awkward reunion of Ray and Una, 15 years after a passionate affair when he was 40 and she was just a minor. After years in prison and subsequent hardships, Ray has a new identity and has made a new life for himself, but Una, now 27, has thought of nothing else since, and sets out to find him, looking for answers, not vengeance.
In Conor McPherson’s “Dublin Carol,” Petersen plays John, a man whose life was nearly destroyed by drinking, and who now holds down a steady job at a Dublin undertaker’s office. When his estranged daughter appears on Christmas Eve with disturbing news, it sets off a series of painful confessions that ultimately offer John a chance to escape the burden of his past.
Petersen is the 42nd member to join Steppenwolf, which was founded by Gary Sinise, Terry Kinney and Jeff Perry in 1974 in a church basement in Highland Park. The theatre relocated to Chicago in 1980 and moved to its current downtown location in 1991. Petersen, an Evanston, IL native, got his start in theatre. At Steppenwolf, he’s appeared in “Balm in Gilead” (1980) and “Fool for Love” (1984). In 1979, he started the Remains Theater Ensemble in Chicago with a group of actors, including current Steppenwolf members Gary Cole and Amy Morton. In 1996, Petersen made his Broadway debut in a revival of Tennessee Williams’ “The Night of the Iguana.”
The 42-member Steppenwolf ensemble includes some major talent, here’s where you might know some of them from off the stage: Joan Allen (Jason Bourne movies, “The Contender”), Kevin Anderson, Alana Arenas, Randall Arney, Kate Arrington, Ian Barford, Robert Breuler, Gary Cole (”Office Space,” “Desperate Housewives”), Kathryn Erbe (Det. Eames on “Law & Order: Criminal Intent”), K. Todd Freeman (Mr. Trick on “Buffy,” “The Cider House Rules,”), Frank Galati, Francis Guinan, Moira Harris, Jon Michael Hill, Tim Hopper, Tom Irwin (”My So Called Life”), Ora Jones, Terry Kinney (”Oz”), Tina Landau, Martha Lavey, Tracy Letts (won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play “August: Osage County”), John Mahoney (”Frasier”), John Malkovich (”Being John Malkovich), Mariann Mayberry, James Vincent Meredith, Laurie Metcalf (Jackie on “Roseanne”), Amy Morton, Sally Murphy, Austin Pendleton, Jeff Perry (”Nash Bridges”), William Petersen, Yasen Peyankov, Martha Plimpton (”The Goonies”), Rondi Reed, Molly Regan, Anna D. Shapiro, Eric Simonson, Gary Sinise (”CSI: New York,” “Forrest Gump”), Lois Smith (Gran on “True Blood”), Rick Snyder, Jim True-Frost (Prez on “The Wire”) and Alan Wilder.
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Posted 11 months, 1 week ago. 5 comments
GARDENIA (April, 15 – May, 15 1983) / Bis 29. Mai 1983 (verlängert)
Play by John Guare
Directed by Gregory Mosher
Cast: Gary Cole, Elizabeth Perkins, Richard Seer, William L. Petersen, Patricia Harkness, Jack Wallace
Hier ein paar gesammelte Dinge zu seinem Ausstieg:
http://www.grissomandsara.de/hp90z/Endecsi.htm
William Petersen returns to Chicago to star in Blackbird
By Edith McCauley, Theater Critic
William Petersen last performed at Victory Gardens Theater in 1998 and returns to appear in David Harrower’s Blackbird, a gripping work based on the premise of the questions and complications of child abuse. As the founder of Remains Theater Ensemble, he was active in Chicago, later becoming familiar to many as the star of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation on television. He serves as executive producer and was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for his starring role in that series.
Petersen, as Ray, is confronted by Una, played by Mattie Hawkinson, 15 years after a devastating relationship that changed their lives forever. Una, at 12, becomes sexually involved when Ray attends a neighborhood gathering at her home. His kindness to her becomes much more, and throughout the 90-minute intensity of their widely-different memories of the situation, we have very mixed interpretations of the whole affair. Her accusations of abuse are often combined with her protestations of love and anger for his desertion following a sexual encounter.
Ray, having served a prison sentence, has begun a new life and proclaims his success in the world of business, but questions remain. Harrower’s dialogue comes across almost as poetry. Statements and responses of a few words, sometimes only one, take great concentration. Victory Gardens uses a wall next to the stage as a screen for the hearing impaired, so every word is visual as well as oral. At times, it created a distraction.
Petersen and Hawkinson, directed by Artistic Director Dennis Zacek, are beautifully cast. Both characters engender sympathy, and we leave not sure how it all began or where the future lies. At the talk-back following last week’s performance, the audience of mostly seniors saw the story as one of abuse of a child. It did not seem that simple to me.
Harrower’s choice of title, Blackbird, is a British term for jailbird, but in the context of this play could have multiple meanings. Opening July 13, it has played to sold-out houses, and tickets are at a premium. We were fortunate to call 15 minutes after six seats became available. For ticket information, call (773) 871-3000, or go online to: tickets@victorygardens.org. There has been an extension, so, like me, you may be in luck.
In David Harrower’s Blackbird, It’s Complicated
He’s not just a pedophile, and she’s not just his victim.
By Albert Williams
The first thing you hear in Victory Gardens Theater’s Blackbird is the sound of an acoustic guitar—a gentle prelude to the fireworks to come. There’s no vocal, but the song—Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird,” from the Beatles’ 1968 White Album—is instantly recognizable, and its words float in your head: “Blackbird singing in the dead of night / Take these broken wings and learn to fly . . . into the light of the dark black night.”
Una and Ray, the principal characters in this unremittingly intense 80-minute one-act by Scottish playwright David Harrower, are birds with broken wings—psychologically crippled by an episode that left both their lives in tatters. She’s 27, he’s 56, and they’ve had a brief affair—about 15 years earlier, when he was 40 and she was 12. They haven’t seen each other since Ray was sent to prison for statutory rape (”blackbird” is British slang for “jailbird”). Una has endured a lifetime of being “talked about, pointed at, stared at,” while Ray has done his time, changed his name, moved to a new city, and rebuilt his life. Now called Peter, he’s the manager of a medical-supplies manufacturing firm. Una, who’s found him after stumbling across his photo in a trade magazine in her doctor’s office, has him cornered in the littered lunchroom of his workplace. But why? To accuse him? Humiliate him? Attack him? Hurt him? Kill him? Or to rekindle the relationship?
Blackbird debuted in 2005 at the Edinburgh International Festival before moving to London’s West End and winning the Laurence Olivier Award for best new play. Now receiving its Chicago premiere at Victory Gardens, with William L. Petersen as Ray and Mattie Hawkinson as Una, it’s the work of a very skillful writer. Like David Mamet and Harold Pinter, Harrower knows how to distill the fractured syntax, half-completed sentences, stuttering repetitions, and pregnant pauses of conversation into a stark, stylized, nerve-jangling poetry. He knows how to heighten tension with dramatically well-timed interruptions—a phone that rings at an awkward moment, an unwanted knock on the door—and startling outbursts of violent action. And he knows how to leave questions unresolved. Like Oleanna, Mamet’s tale of a middle-aged college teacher’s disastrous encounter with a female student, or Doubt, John Patrick Shanley’s portrait of a nun who suspects a priest of child molestation, Blackbird allows—even forces—audience members to impose their own interpretations on the events they’ve seen.
As Una and Ray retrace the events that led to their “three-month stupid mistake,” Harrower questions whether Una is more traumatized by the affair or by its aftermath—her parents’ fury, the intrusive medical exams, the guilt-inducing sessions with a soft-spoken psychiatrist who asked her why she hurt people who loved her, the trial, the media, the gossip. Exploring the blurry line between passion and perversion, love and abuse, Blackbird suggests that intimate relationships between adults and minors are taboo not because they’re abnormal but because they’re all too natural. Ray insists he’s not one of “those sick bastards” who gets off on underage girls; his desire for Una arose from an inappropriate but sincere affection. And Una was no Nabokovian nymphet, but an average pubescent girl drawn to a mature man who, unlike most other adults, didn’t treat her like a kid.
This compelling play demands complete commitment and honesty from its actors while testing their memory and concentration to the limit. In Dennis Zacek’s thoughtful, beautifully paced staging, every moment counts, as each answer raises new questions and each flash of insight raises the drama’s emotional stakes, building to a shocking final twist. Petersen’s haunting Ray—a man torn simultaneously by guilt and a lingering, aching passion—perfectly balances Hawkinson’s blistering, surgically precise Una, whose life is a constant, quietly desperate struggle with panic, depression, anger, and longing. Watching this duo warily face off, then relax to the point where they can share water from the same plastic bottle, is like watching two hostile animals as approach the same water hole. Lit by Jesse Klug, Dean Taucher’s lunchroom set comes complete with folding metal chairs, card tables, headache-inducing fluorescent lights, and garbage cans filled to overflowing with junk-food wrappers and soft-drink cans—a perfect metaphor for the emotional mess Ray has spent a lifetime trying to dispose of.
Blackbird dissects pedophilia but also transcends that subject, finding universality in extreme circumstances. Anyone who’s ever tried to revisit a failed relationship—a broken love affair, a marriage that ended in bitter divorce, a childhood with abusive parents—will understand the challenge Una and Ray face as they sort through the secrets and self-deceptions, trying to comprehend the past so they can move forward into the light of the dark black night.
Posted 1 year ago. 1 comment
Mattie Hawkinson wipes the floor with William Petersen in ‘Blackbird’
Mattie Hawkinson (Una) confronts William Petersen (Ray) about a sexual affair they had 15 years ago.
William Petersen fans beware, ‘Blackbird’ is a long way from ‘CSI’ (posted July 5)
In the new Victory Gardens production of David Harrower’s harrowing “Blackbird,” a Chicago actress named Mattie Hawkinson wipes the floor with William Petersen, star of “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and the name above the title on the infamous Biograph Theatre marquee.
Actually, that doesn’t adequately describe it. In a career-making performance, at once determined, vulnerable, nuanced and primal, Hawkinson tosses Petersen into the garbage. This destruction reduces Petersen to a shaking, eye-rubbing, terrified, spiteful, hollow-eyed, self-loathing piece of jelly.
And that is greatly to his credit. Few high-profile stars of TV procedurals would return to an intense, unforgiving Chicago stage for such a public battering and meltdown, especially in service of a play that revolves around a young woman named Una, who shows up at the workplace of her former lover, Ray, ready to confront him with the sexual affair the couple had 15 years ago. When he was 40 and she was 12.
“Backbird,” which began at the Edinburgh International Festival and caused something of a critical sensation when it showed up in London in 2007, is one of the best British plays of the decade. Its qualities are myriad, but many of them flow from the sparse intensity of Harrower’s writing, and his clear-eyed ability to explore all of the facets of such a poisonous relationship and its consequences without ever justifying or rationalizing what went on between a messed-up middle-age man and a needy almost-adolescent in a little seaside guesthouse.
This is a play about a sexual predator and his prey. One never doubts that. But Harrower also dares to look at all sides. And because he is willing to explore how the victim of such a crime must live with a complex stew of feelings—revolving around her own identity and a perverse longing for the man who caused such trauma—“Blackbird” ends up as a far deeper condemnation of such a selfish act than the typical two-dimensional treatments that have long dominated the dramatic depiction of this most disturbing of subjects.
The less you know in advance about exactly what Una does to Ray in the break room of his workplace, the better. She tells us early on that she wanted to stamp out his eyes. He tells her she is “some kind of ghost, turning up from nowhere to …”
This is a great script—and I don’t use that adjective lightly—because it shows us how a democratic society’s calibration is enhanced by fullness of ethical exploration. Indeed, “Blackbird” makes the case that an understanding of human complexity is a prerequisite for moral behavior. And, despite a subject that makes your skin crawl, it manages to spiral off into other gripping moral matters.
One ponders past mistakes and the likelihood of their sudden re-appearance. One ponders past assaults on oneself. And one starts to think about the trickiest issue within this particular area of jurisprudence: If a sexual predator claims a one-off transgression and pays a price of incarceration, can he ever be let off the hook? Can he ever be allowed to go about his business? Does he deserve to be hunted until he drops into his grave?
“Blackbird” has no answers. It recalls David Mamet’s “Oleanna” in its ambiguities (but not its sympathies), and also Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned To Drive” in its rich understanding of the journey faced by a victim of abuse. It also is very much its own beast.
Hawkinson has mostly played quirky comedic roles to date. She has never been cast here in anything quite like this. And under Dennis Zacek’s direction, she lobs lines, pleads, emotes, rages and, it feels, twists her entire body into the emotional pretzel that her character has become. Hollowed, callow and, as the play demands, pathetically sympathetic, Petersen, who digs far deeper than he did in “Dublin Carol” at Steppenwolf last year, takes you on the fullest of emotional journeys. You are right there with him, and you are also nowhere near him, which is exactly right.
“Blackbird,” which was produced in New York in 2007 with Jeff Daniels and Alison Pill, has not been Americanized well. Its setting still feels mostly British. But that’s a trivial flaw. There’s also a moment in this production—one involving the aforementioned garbage—that doesn’t feel fully earned. Trivial again.
This must-see show of the summer gets right pretty much everything that matters, beginning with a set from Dean Taucher that’s the best design I’ve seen in this particular theater. If it looks deceptively ordinary, look again. You could say that about the whole show.
Thanks to a pair of deeply gutsy performances and Zacek’s quietly courageous direction, “Blackbird” had the Victory Gardens audience fully in its claws at Monday night’s opening. At one wrenching moment, the whole theater seemed to let out a cry, almost in unison, but not quite.