One To Watch - Brief Article

Direct and to the Point Ivo van Hove is a director with one clear purpose: telling stories in a fresh way. Over the past few years, in Europe and in off-Broadway New York theaters, van Hove, who is in his early forties, has been establishing a reputation for his startling interpretations of classic plays. In Belgium and Holland, audiences know him as the director of Het Zuidelijk Toneel, the preeminent Dutch language theater, but in the U.S. van Hove remains little known. Though his credentials, a "European avantgarde theater director working in the Brechtian tradition," might lead some to confuse him with the "Sprockets" character Mike Myers played on Saturday Night Live, he's a man with a serious artistic vision.

Working on texts by challenging dramatists like Eugene O'Neill, Sophocies, and Jean Genet, van Hove strips away almost anything not fundamental to the telling of the story--there are few props or stage walls or costumes. For example, in his production of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, presented last fall at New York Theatre Workshop, he filled the stage with little more than Blanche DuBois' bathtub (normally placed offstage), and in so doing refocused the play on Blanche's most private, most intimate moments. "I want to push," van Hove says, "without sacrificing the author's intended communication."

Van Hove organized his first productions in laundries, factories, and in the open-air marketplaces of Brussels, where he spent his school years. His performers were friends from various art schools--musicians, painters, and designers--and this way of working taught the director how to use limited resources for radical effect. Recently, he has been focusing on works by American writers, demonstrating how much more can be plumbed to reveal hidden depth and texture in well-known pieces--even those you would think had already been laid bare.

Van Hove's production of Alice in Bed (adapted from a play by Susan Sontag) can be seen at New York Theatre Workshop in fall 2000.

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