dispatch 3... THE BRIEF, 2009-2010 -looking back, looking forward

DISPATCHES FROM THE CULTURAL FRONT

In my previous two dispatches I spelled out my aesthetic prejudices and artistic morals, and introduced a term, Theater Present, to describe a sensibility that I perceive surging through American theater today (see dispatch 1 and 2), declaring “SOMETHING IS GOING ON in American theater.”  The shows and companies mentioned below are not only proof positive of my assertion, but the meat and bones of that ‘something’.

If shows in New York and popping up and touring around the country last year are any indication, the surge remains vital.  Work of note in last year’s season is nearly too numerous to list, much more, to analyze sufficiently...



Things I Saw of Note (the list/insufficient analysis):

Nature Theater of Oklahoma

Romeo and Juliet – NaTO premiered their finished Romeo and Juliet at the Kitchen (previously shown as a work-in-progress in New York; it continues to tour all over the world, next in Portland, OR).  Instead of adding a modern twist or deconstructing Shakespeare’s text, this tireless company, driven by its creative directors, Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper, has transcribed descriptions of the plot of Shakespeare’s best known tragedy and placed the stuttering, hilariously misremembered transcriptions into the mouths and bodies of two of their regular company members – the always game and impressive Robert M. Johanson and the peerless Anne Gridley.  This is a great introduction to NaTO – their interests, their methods, their tone – even if it does not quite achieve the transcendent, theater-forward level of their masterpieces – Poetics, a ballet brut, No Dice, and the still-in-development, Life and Times.

Life and Times - I also saw video this year of the 3 and 1/2 hour Life and Times, episode 1, from an archival recording made in Vienna (currently touring Europe with some cast replacements).  This absurdly ambitious opera sets the transcription of an interview about one woman’s life – no ‘um’s or ‘uh’s excluded – to joyous music and strangely primal choreography, elevating the vagaries of young childhood to the, well, operatic... and that’s just the FIRST PART!  Episode 2 will premiere in Vienna on November 5th this fall, and rumor has it they are developing enough future episodes to fill 24-hours.  I could not be more excited.  Given the shockingly fresh work they have already created, I still assert that with this piece NaTO has done the unlikely of pushing the form even further than previously achieved.  Not only is Life and Times, episode 1 eminently enjoyable, it is mind-bogglingly constructed.  Through your laughter and tears, you just have to shake your head at the aesthetic and technical achievement of all involved.  Word is the productions can be expensive to mount (a New York City premiere of Life and Times is not even scheduled yet), but if you’re wise, you’ll beg your local arts board to spring for any one of this hard-working, hard-traveling company’s shows to land in your town.



The National Theater of the United States OF AMERICA

Chautauqua! – Awarded “The President’s Award” by the Lower Manhattan Culture Council for the show, NTUSA remounted and toured Chautauqua! last year, most recently performing at the Long Wharf in New Haven.  This show, not entirely ironically, plays with a traveling American educational movement of the late-19th/early-20th century (called, naturally, Chautauquas) that, as the show explains, traveled the prairie and other remote areas to put on historical, geographical, and scientific pageants for communities that otherwise lacked formal exposure to these subjects, and mixed in variety acts to attract all crowds.  NTUSA basically puts on one of these Chautauquas, cleverly making the beginning of theirs about the Chautauqua movement itself and whatever venue they happen to be performing; inviting a guest lecturer to speak nightly; and, as you might imagine, refracting all of this through a contemporary lens.  The show basically contains everything I want out of theater – presence (that is, direct address and acknowledgement of the audience and the performance site); self-aware humor; circus-grade clowning and precision; displaying both sly and brazen theatrical intelligence.  Specifically I appreciated NTUSA’s burrowing more deeply into each section than might be expected in our short-attention society (even while employing some of the attention-hopping modes of television and new media), which, through this duration, reset my mind to observe, notice, and wander expansively through historical narratives and morals I had previously considered settled and understood for myself.  The company understands that it would be way too thin a precept to simply subvert or point at the goofy folksiness of this populist movement of yore, opting bravely to try their hand at actually presenting one to the hip contemporary theatergoer.  Bravo!



31 DOWN radio theater

Red Over Red – Just closing a couple of weeks ago as part of the ever more consistently reputable Incubator Series, this most original theater company – brain child of the eccentric and endlessly imaginative Ryan Holsopple and Shannon Sindelar – returned with one of their best and most unsettling works to date.  Uniquely, 31 Down makes aural sculpture and original sound design their theatrical stock-in-trade among their constant technical innovations that include creative use of live and recorded video, pre-recorded dialogue, projectors, and motion sensors.  Holsopple is a wizard programmer and electrician, and Sindelar complements this with a show-shaping wizardry of her own, reining all the disparate elements of their shows into the coherent whole.  Coming off the success of last summer’s, The Assember Dilator, which explored the perversions, humiliations, and horrors of obsessive laboratory research, Red Over Red portrays paranoia and helplessness surrounding plane flight and travel (aviophobes beware!).  A love quadrangle are all unwittingly involved in a plane crash at the center of the story, but that does not begin to describe the experience of this “nerve-jangling theatrical nightmare” (in the accurate words of The Times).  The attenuated, noir-paced action is enriched by the sound-extreme, whole-sensory theatrical construction that transports its audience (even in a high-ceilinged theater) inside a claustrophobic airplane bathroom, a crowded hard-core club, and all of the characters’ heads.  You feel you are being crashed, crushed, assaulted, aroused.  Indescribable and impossible to do justice in mere linguistic terms, this show is the second thing you have to ask your community organizers to invite to town (and I happen to know they’re much more affordable than NaTO). I will see anything 31 Down creates.

 

HOI POLLOI (Rick Burkhardt, Alec Duffy, Dave Malloy)

Three Pianos – Alternately and accurately described by its creators as a “theatrical explosion of Franz Schubert’s Wintereisse” or “Schubert’s Wintereisse mayhemed,” this was the great surprise of the late winter for me.  Created in the Incubator Series and transferring to New York Theatre Workshop’s main season next year (if you don’t live here, plan a trip to New York around it!), this play is somehow a tight and illuminating staging of Schubert’s masterpiece song cycle as well as an overflowing, wine-drenched circus of three friends interpreting and arguing about the song cycle; embodying Schubert-and-friends themselves drinking and singing at a ‘Schubertiad;’ intermingled with a general meditation on meaningful relationships in a meaning-neutral world.  Directed by the TEAM’s lead creative force, Rachel Chavkin, it features deeply vulnerable and highly exuberant performances from all three creator/performers (we can expect nothing less from the combination - Duffy of Hoi Polloi, Burkhardt of Nonsense Company, and Malloy of Banana Bag and Bodice).  While entirely original, their treatment of the famous song cycle makes a case for seriously fun “explosions” of the entire classical music concert format.  Part of my enthusiasm for this piece stems from its cross-cultural appeal - playing credibly among the most bizarre experiments of New York’s downtown theater scene, but legitimately inviting a transfer to Carnegie Hall. (Carnegie programmers take note!)  At the very least, Burkhardt, Duffy, and Malloy have extended the reputation of Schubert (and the poet Wilhelm Muller!, whose poem Schubert lifted for the libretto) as transcendent of his time and place.  Watching this haunting yet celebratory staging of the gloomy cycle renders the conventional German-Expressionist treatment ridiculous.  Without being false to the spirit of the cycle, these three wild men and their creative team have generated a night of theater that is anything but meaning-neutral.

  

LES FRERES CORBUSIER

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson – Alex Timbers, the producer/director that has brought us many brazenly irreverent, rockin’ shows such as Manifest Destiny and Heddatron, has returned (this time as writer too) with possibly his company’s most fitting combination of subject and treatment since their A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant.  I imagine the creative team conceived of this play back when populist sentiment about 'beer drinking' with George Dubya was at a height. What a boon they must have felt when the next president swept into office with enormous popular support, an outsider perspective, and anti-establishment rhetoric only to find that governing a plurality of interests is damn difficult.  Not that democratic governance is remotely the only issue on the mind of this play. In fact, Bloody Bloody manages to both shock and horrify us that are descendants of genocidal war and benefactors of the displacement of America's indigenous population, while (improbably) complicating the received history on the subject AND, all at once, managing high-pitched hilarity the entire running time!  Smart writing. Deft staging. All-out performances. The last moment is an eerie rush.

Like Three Pianos, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is transferring from its run at The Public to a Broadway house next season.  Do yourself a favor. SEE IT!

 

ANNIE BAKER

The Aliens – Any playwright interested in treading hackneyed territory should find a production or print of Annie Baker’s The Aliens to watch or read.  Any theatergoer benumbed by the predominantly cliché offerings of mainstream American theater, should seek The Aliens for restoration.  Any theatrical producer looking for a producible masterpiece (production requirements-wise... can’t speak to the cost of the rights or your abilities), given the right attention, you will have one on your hands in The Aliens.  Well-worn subjects need a coordinate amount of work on them, and Baker has put in the right amount of effort. (Note to most playwrights: THINK AND WORK HARDER!)  With nothing less than jaw-dropping restraint, Baker leads us through the remarkably simple narrative toward anything but simple implications.  She introduces us to two mangy outsiders that spend their time illicitly hanging at the employee table behind a coffee shop in Vermont and then introduces them to a new teenage employee who, at first, is not sure how to remove them, but shortly accepts their overtures to join them.  Sound thin for a two-hour play?  That’s the thing.  I cannot fairly reveal more of the plot, but any more than what Baker includes or any variation in the unfolding of the action (such as it isn’t) would bury the work under hopeless contrivance.  But because Baker thought hard enough about what story she is telling, we are all rewarded for it.  Because it was given attention nonpareil by director, Sam Gold, and his design team, and extraordinarily performed by cast members Michael Chernus, Dane DeHaan, and Eric Gann at its premiere at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, I am afraid that any less of a production could render the play an embarrassment.  But since I saw this superlative production, I can attest, if you see it and do not like it, it is not Ms. Baker’s fault.

 

     THE EVEN BRIEFER, 2009-2010

 

Things I Saw of Note (just a list):

 

REID FARRINGTON – Gin and “It”  @ P.S. 122

YOUNG JEAN LEE – Lear @ Soho Rep

TEMPORARY DISTORTION – American Kamikaze @ P.S. 122

IVO VAN HOVE – Opening Night @ B.A.M.

THE WOOSTER GROUP – North Atlantic @ The Baryshnikov

Center

CYNTHIA HOPKINS – The Truth: a tragedy @ Soho Rep

(I’m sure I’m forgetting a few things...)

 

 

Notables I Missed:

 

WITNESS RELOCATION – Haggadah @ La Mama; Five Days in

March @ East River Park, Summer Stage

THEATER GROTTESCO – Richest Deadman Alive Santa Fe, NM

ÆTHERPLOUGH – human:nature @ Kaneko

(I’m sure I’m forgetting a few things...)

 

Looking Forward:

 

TEAM – Mission Drift

ELEVATOR REPAIR SERVICE – GATZ @ The Public

BANANA BAG AND BODICE – Beowulf @ East River Park,

Summer Stage

TONY KUSHNER – Angels in America (revival); iHo (new

play) @ Signature Theatre

THEATER GROTTESCO – OM, Ten Tiny Epics in an Outlet Mall

Santa Fe, NM