Omar Sangare

Santa Barbara, September 29, 2001

Santa Barbara News-Press
Life

More of the Unusual and Engaging

By Michael Smith

The remarkable Lit Moon World Theatre Festival offered two more unusual and
engaging performance pieces Thursday evening at Center Stage Theater. Its
deconstructed “Hamlet” opened last week and continues in repertory.

“True Theatre Critic” is a one-man show by the young Polish actor Omar Sangare.
“The Visions of Aksenty Ivanovich” is an original work by the host company, Santa
Barbara’s Lit Moon Theatre Company, inspired by Nikolai Gogol’s famous story
“The Diary of a Madman.” Both performances will be repeated today at 4 and 9 p.m., respectively.

Advanced theater these days supports itself by touring, and the Lit Moon Festival puts
Santa Barbara on a lively circuit that is gradually expanding from Europe to the United
States. Everywhere small but avid audiences crave a serious, adventurous alternative
to conventional theater and mainstream entertainment. The festival is a rich contribution
to our cultural life.

Omar Sangare’s “True Theatre Critic” earned him a Best Actor award as the New York International Fringe Festival, and it’s not hard to see why. He is a remarkable
presence on stage, physically beautiful with his shaved head and expressive mouth
and eyes, and a virtuoso of physical control. The piece opens in a minimalist vein,
drawing into the mind of an obsessed theater critic with wordless looks and bare
fragments of gesture. The action is so pared down that a simple movement of
the eyes makes the audience jump, and laugh. I have rarely seen an actor so capable
of making thought visible in all its glimmers and dissolving. Using the simplest of props,
a typewriter ona table, one piece of paper, a chair, Mr. Sangare skillfully expands
his range to include the Shakespearean. It is classic clowning and wholly original.

As a theatre critic myself, I have never felt so truly and deliciously mocked. The critic
reflects savagely on his failures as a creator and an actor, blaming and disdaining
the “silly school of drama” that rejected him, the “professional actor” who dared to
judge him, and the play sardonically exposes his own self-importance. Yet the driving
force is a genuine love of theater, a pure sincerity.

Cellist Jakub Omsky added a prelude and subtle musical comment in the more
expressionist episodes. A sequence in Polish was particularly engaging; Mr. Sangare’s
English is good but a bit halting, and the momentum took off when he broke into his own language. Toward the end, defying his editor’s advice to “Control yourself,” the critic
declares, “I will be ruthless,” and goes quite berserk, a role-specific tendency we critics
are well aware of.

Poland’s theater artists, Jerzy Grotowski and others, led the way in redefining acting in
the second half of the 20th century. It is a treat to have Omar Sangare bring his fresh embodiment of this wonderful tradition to Santa Barbara.