Love, Leisure, and Philosophy

Waiting in line to get a cheeseburger, holding a cold beer in my hand, I smiled when the woman in front of me said “What a great idea. What a great concept.” I responded, “Yeah, I’m already having a better time than I do at most shows.” Indeed, my favorite moments of Charles Mee’s Fire Island, now playing at the 3LD Arts Center, came before a word of the playwright’s text had been uttered. Surrounded by enormous high-definition video of beautiful island landscapes, milling about the space or sitting on cushions and low-to-the-ground beach chairs next to coolers full of ice, soda, and beer, the audience members chatted and smiled and took in the atmosphere. This friendly, unstructured feeling persisted even once the performance had begun. The food truck left but the coolers of beer and soda remained. In between scenes actors and audience members alike dashed or stretched to grab a cold one. As enjoyable as all of this was, though, about half an hour into it I couldn’t help but wishing that the text itself provided comparable pleasures.

Fire Island is one of Mee’s meditative, conceptual works. A series of episodes—some loosely linked together, others not—finds hyper-articulate men and women of leisure flirting, arguing, having sex, and walking along the beach, all while expounding on and debating the nature(s) of love. This is well-worn ground for the playwright, and those familiar with his other work will recognize passages from more successful plays peppered throughout. Filia vs eros, the history of marriage, the aesthetics of soap operas, differences between the genders: these and other topics emerge as sites for mildly angsty musings as various couples wind their way through the space. Sometimes they stroll; sometimes they chase one another, playfully or otherwise. They shout, they whisper, they caress, they laugh. Through all of this, though, they never seem to be going anywhere. Mee conceives of his island paradise as a landscape outside of time, a place that enables long philosophical conversations about passions and preoccupations.

Some of the scenes play out on the enormous video screens, some occur live in the space. A few, intriguingly, occur both on video and live. The actors are not asked to reproduce their taped performances, but allow the words and emotions and gestures of the live scenes to overlap with and slide up against those they previously recorded. The actors are miked, but we are still able to hear where the voices are coming from when the scenes are played live and the actors are moving through the space. These moments raise a host of issues too academic to pursue here, but it is worth noting that theatre scholars and enthusiasts interested in ongoing debates about “presence” and “liveness” will find much food for thought.

The video projections are stunning and calming, successfully providing a sense of place and time that encourages the audience to sit back and soak in the experience of the production rather than engaging it in more conventional ways. A live band that combines classic rock with Tuvan throat-singing and a hostess who occasionally circulates through the space offering to pour wine for audience members add to the festive, laid-back atmosphere.

I am of a mixed mind about the text itself. It seems specious to complain that the musings and aphorisms about the nature of love often feel clichéd. Indeed, part of Mee’s ongoing project is to explore the fact that philosophers of antiquity can sound clichéd and soap operas profound, and that there may be a fractured and fragmented series of links between the most disparate of sources. To complain that we have heard these questions and thoughts from Mee before also seems beside the point.

Again: recycling, re-imaging, and re-making are precisely the foundation for his often celebrated work. The lack of palpable urgency or passion in conversations about love, sex, suicide, etc. struck me as strange, but it also struck me as at the core of the production: Mee’s Fire Island, as realized by director Kevin Cunningham and his team of technical wizards, is meant to provide a soothing backdrop for fraught conversations and thus allow some perspective on and distance from them.

As I have often enjoyed Mee’s plays, then, what was it that was bothering me about this one?

Another question may provide the answer. Watching the scenes unfold between various couples, I repeatedly asked myself “Who are these people?” Who are these people who have so much time to sit around talking about things they have clearly talked about before? Who are these people who take the breath-taking beauty of their island real estate for granted and not for luxury? Mee has not created characters to people his island; he has created vessels for his own leisurely musings. None of these figures is in any way aware of the privilege that allows them to spend so much time recycling their thoughts and longings. They have no responsibilities and their actions have no consequences. As such, their conflicts fall flat. These characters aren’t in crises or in the throes of passion; the only thing at stake here is whether they will find adequate comfort in one another and whether they will find words eloquent enough, clever enough, trenchant enough to pass the time.

Still, though, the cheeseburger was really good.

Kitsch! Nostalgia! & Cultural Imperialism!

The third annual New York Ukulele Festival is upon us. This year, it brings with it a brand new musical about a ragtag band of ukulele players who save the world from a fascist dystopia run by an all-powerful pharmaceutical company. Upon reading this, some of you may have already grabbed your credit cards and datebooks while others may be making a mental note to stay out of the East Village for a couple of weeks. Both are understandable reactions. Sex! Drugs! & Ukuleles!, written by festival founder Uke Jackson, is an ostensibly activist, anti-corporate kitsch-fest set in a not-too-distant future. Sex is illegal. Monogamy is outlawed. Excessive sadness, happiness, anger, and lust are all medicated away by legislative mandate. Only the “corporate top ten” musical acts are allowed to perform and sell their music. Max (John Forkner), Liz (Lindsay Foreman), and Julie (Meg Cavanaugh) are three spirited young musicians who dream of cracking the top ten and bringing their smiley-faced music to the masses but have little hope of doing so until they meet Pete (Andrew Guilarte), a back-alley ruffian who may or may not have once been one of the top ten himself. Fame and fortune, twists and turns, and a revolution of sorts ensue.

The intentionally cornball, slapstick energy works for a while and the performers bring admirable enthusiasm and comic timing to a show that is clearly a lot of fun to perform. Terry Waldo’s music, performed by the actors and by two onstage musicians (Waldo on piano and John Gill on percussion) is enjoyable in its way, though fourteen songs in an eighty-minute show that’s also chock-full of plot and dialogue make for a rushed and superficial experience that doesn’t embody feel-good nostalgia so much as declare it. The result is rather like being surrounded by shouting, grinning theme-park performers who keep asking “Isn’t this fun?!? Huh?! Huh?!? Isn’t it?!?” without giving you a chance to respond.

Indeed, for a play that purports to deplore the dehumanized superficiality of contemporary culture, Sex! Drugs! & Ukuleles! presents the audience with a surprisingly one-note idea of what “good music” is. Just as the fictional citizenry of the Corporation are sedated into a chemical contentment, the audience for this show are asked to respond in an almost Pavlovian manner to music that signifies a tiki-bar vision of happy playfulness.

Ironically enough, the vision of authentic, heartfelt, handmade music presented by Jackson’s play relies on nostalgia for an aesthetic almost as artificial as 21st-century top-ten pop. The ukulele and the homegrown Hawaiian music it represented were repackaged, appropriated, and commodified by Tin Pan Alley songwriters and vaudeville producers who smelled “the next big thing.” Having recently annexed Hawaii, the United States quickly plasticized, commercialized, and capitalized on its culture, selling the world a vision of smiling, hip-swaying natives in coconut-shell bras who wanted nothing more than to serve as hotel lobby entertainment for vacationers from the mainland. Ukulele players from Ernest Kai, to Eddie Kamae, to Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, to Jake Shimabukuro have shown again and again that their instrument of choice is capable of a great deal more.

It is telling that “ukulele” is mispronounced (from a Hawaiian perspective) throughout the play. Sex! Drugs! & Ukuleles! can all too easily be read as a celebration of and nostalgia for the willful ignorance of early-American imperialism. It may seem unfair to saddle a such a lighthearted show with that kind of baggage, but wistful evocations of simpler, happier times tend to rely on distortions of history and culture that carry their own dangers and pitfalls. I can’t help but wonder whether, 90 years from now, a sweet and silly show with energetic young performers will mourn for the simpler, happier music of Britney’s first CD.

Women in the Shadows

Despite Susan Sontag’s famous claim that camp sensibility is essentially apolitical because it is purely aesthetic, and that it is about a refusal to identify or engage with extreme emotions, the impulse behind camp has often, if not always, been a reaction to and sympathy with great pain. The politics of camp are a politics of persistent, if sometimes coded, visibility. It is that visibility, that celebration of the artificial, barely disguised codes of gender and sexual difference, which fueled the paradigm-shifting events at the Stonewall Tavern in 1969. Beebo Brinker Chronicles, adapted by Kate Moira Ryan and Linda S. Chapman from a series of novels by Ann Bannon, is not full-on camp, but there is a campiness in its stylization of emotion and its celebration of Bannon’s gloriously over-the-top hardboiled language. Unlike true camp, however, Beebo Brinker Chronicles lets the curtain slip a little so we can see the pain beneath the laughs.

Bannon’s books, first published in the late 1950s and early 1960s, are feverish, emotionally charged pulp novels about lesbians struggling against heteronormativity to find sex, love, and a sense of self. These tales of butch and femme, of housewives and barflies, are infused with a sweaty-palmed urgency and sensual turn of phrase that drove them to sell hundreds of thousands of copies in a time when no one could claim that a flirtation with lesbianism was in any way “fashionable.”

The performances, slightly stylized and over-the-top, are remarkable. Three in particular stand out: Autumn Dornfield’s Beth is a frenzied bundle of repressed desire, struggling to maintain dignity as she discovers a new life in Greenwich Village. Beebo herself (Jennn Colella) is a hardened and cynical but still secretly romantic figure who is afraid anyone attracted to as masculine a woman as she must actually want a man. Jack (David Greenspan) is an aging, semi-closeted alcoholic with a taste for younger men. Each of these actors embraces the tone of the production, balancing stylization with passion, and irony with pathos. Greenspan in particular is in his element here. His peculiar, self-aware acting style always brings with it a distinct whiff of metatheatricality, and in Beebo Brinker Chronicles he shines with such wit and precision that the other actors, fine as they are, fade by comparison.

Rachel Hauck’s cleverly efficient set is constructed and painted to evoke the faded glory of fifties-era pulp fiction book covers. Nicole Pearce’s lights and Theresa Squire’s costumes further add to this atmosphere, not so much recreating a time as re-imagining a memory of a fiction. The affectionate nostalgia of the production design compliment nicely the work of the actors and the playwrights. Credit for the cohesion of these various elements must go to director Leigh Silverman.

In the play's opening scenes, the tone is all humor and irony, but as the action progresses it becomes clear that the humor is both a way to mask the great pain that drives the story and a reminder to the audience that things, in many ways, are different now. As recent headlines attest, there can still be good reasons to fear coming out as gay or lesbian, but for much of the audience of Beebo Brinker Chronicles, this show is a chance to celebrate how much has had to change in order for these tales to be rendered as a brightly lit object of nostalgia rather than a guilty, dog-eared pleasure hidden carefully under the mattress.

Techno Fetish

The publicity materials for (Rus)h, the new multimedia production from James Scruggs and Kristin Marting, present the project as an innovative and boundary-transgressing narrative that is facilitated by an adventurous application of technology. The production itself, however, feels more like an innovative and boundary-transgressing experiment in stage technology that is facilitated by a moderately adventurous narrative. Neither as fragmented nor as transgressive as its marketing materials might lead you to believe, (Rus)h is nevertheless an admirable and mostly successful project that highlights an exciting group of young performers and demonstrates that experiments in multidisciplinary theatre need be neither bloated and ostentatious, nor inaccessible and pretentious. Rus (Luis Vega) is feeling trapped in a once-exciting marriage that has, to his mind, become repetitive and stagnant. He and his wife Sireene (chandra thomas) spend more time talking about flirtations and sexual adventures from earlier in their relationship than they do making new memories. When Rus’s car hits and nearly kills a stranger named Sonny (Lathrop Walker), this sad but pedestrian marital crisis takes a dramatic and disturbing turn. The accident sends Sonny into a coma and Rus, out of both guilt and a strange attraction for the other man, visits him every day in the hospital. As it turns out, Sonny is a thrill-seeking masochist, addicted both to crystal meth and violent encounters. Unable to experience “pleasure” in the normative sense of the word, he may even have leapt in front of Rus’s car in order to feel something. When Sonny wakes from his coma, he sets out to “thank” Rus by drawing him into his world and awakening in him violent desires of his own.

Things spin out of control, predictably enough, though there are enough surprises along the way to keep the audience engaged. The twists and turns of the plot, however, and the specifics of Rus’s “secret desire” serve primarily as a vehicle for Scruggs’s and Martings’s innovative multidisciplinary staging. Dialogue, monologue, dance, video, and puppetry merge almost seamlessly as characters move from memory to fantasy to the present. Rus and Sireene replay their first meeting at a dance club, arguing over the details of the memory even as they remember their initial, mutual attraction. A large panoramic video screen curves around the back of the stage, sometimes providing contextual information, sometimes setting a mood with magnified images of swaying tree leaves, sometimes providing clues to the play’s structure by displaying handwritten questions for the charater. Who is writing these questions: a therapist? a reporter? the police?

Most memorably, two performers carry “video puppets,” portable video screens that serve a number of narrative and psychological functions and also become the production’s most notable display of ingenuity and technique. One moment the screens represent characters’ internal voices, close-ups of mouths shouting or whispering into the ears of the live actors. The next moment, they serve as theatrical x-ray machines, providing a glimpse of an actor/character’s body or revealing the body of a character not on stage, as if x-raying the air itself. These moments require an incredible precision on the part of the dancer-puppeteers who, without looking at the images on their screens must synchoronize the pans and zooms of the video with the movements of their arms in order to enable the illusion that the screens are revealing what is behind them rather than displaying something pre-recorded.

The virtuosity of the designers and the performers, all of whom are first-rate, is a testament to the value of Here Arts Center’s resident artist program, which allows ensembles to work together over a period of time to create new work. The actors bite into their roles with a commitment and enthusiasm that bring life to moments that might otherwise not have worked. When the characters challenge the audience to give them advice or to provide them with drugs, they do so with a longing and an intensity that makes us feel genuinely uncomfortable rather than annoyed by a device we’ve seen countless times. When the ubiquitous Qui Nguyen’s fight choregraphy begins to look awfully similar to the moves we’ve seen from him in a great many other shows, we forgive him because the actors in this case sell those moves so well.

While I have my quibbles and complaints about (Rus)h, the production as a whole held my interest and earned my admiration more than anything I’ve seen in recent months. Both more challenging and more polished than many shows with higher profiles (and higher ticket prices), (Rus)h is a welcome sign that there is still plenty of life, innovation, and bite in New York's downtown theatre scene.

Restoration Redux

I really wanted to like Biyi Bandele’s Oroonoko. Aphra Behn’s problematic but groundbreaking 1688 tale of slavery and rebellion is one of the earliest English novels, and certainly the first to treat indigenous Africans sympathetically. Oroonoko, a prince of Coramantien (present-day Ghana, though, as Bandele points out in a program note, other elements of the tale suggest that it is set in Nigeria) falls in love with Imoinda, a woman whom the lecherous king (Oroonoko’s grandfather) wants to add to his own harem. After a series of related misadventures, Imoinda and Oroonoko are both sold into slavery and taken to Surinam, where Oroonoko’s royal carriage and innate nobility quickly set him apart. Oroonoko helps the plantation owners defeat outside invaders but then organizes a slave revolt and is eventually killed (after he kills Imoinda to prevent her further disgrace.)

While some claim Behn's Oroonoko as an abolitionist novel, others disagree and assert that her strong royalist sympathies are what drive the plot. Oroonoko, after all, is of royal blood, and it is his nobility rather than his humanity that renders his enslavement perverse. Regardless, the character is seen by many as the quintessential noble savage, seemingly without flaws, innately good and noble, worthy of great admiration but not sophisticated enough to prevent his own tragic fate or that of his beloved.

Working in part from Behn’s novel and in part from Thomas Southern’s 1695 dramatic adaptation, playwright Biyi Bandele intends his version of Oroonoko as an act of reclamation. Born and raised in Nigeria and living now in England, Bandele was commissioned by the RSC to write a new prologue for a production of Southerne’s play but ended up instead writing a whole new adaptation. Bandele’s most important contribution to the story of Oroonoko is to allow his protagonist to make some ill-advised decisions, and to show that he feels pain. Behn’s Oroonoko calmly smoked a pipe while being beaten to death, but Bandele’s Oroonoko bleeds, cries, and falls victim to his pride.

Unfortunately, while seeking both to humanize Oroonoko and to lend some authenticity to the tale’s African-ness, Bandele and director Kate Whoriskey have instead crafted a production that doesn’t quite know what it is or what it wants to say. The humor isn't all that funny, the eroticism not all that sexy, the tragedy not all that moving, the ideas not all that provocative, the poetry not all that elevated, and the danger not all that thrilling. This new Oroonoko, I’m sad to say, makes for a better press release than it does a play.

Whoriskey’s production, mounted by Theatre for a New Audience at the Duke Theatre on 42nd Street, is competently staged and features a number of successful performances. Particularly strong are Albert Jones as Oroonoko, Toi Perkins as Imoinda, and Christen Simon as Lady Onola, Imoinda’s guardian. The lights, costumes, and choreography are all professional and polished, but provide few truly memorable moments. Juwon Ogungbe’s percussion-heavy score, performed live by a small ensemble of musicians, is clearly meant to add momentum and excitement but instead ends up feeling, like so much else in this show, more like a gesture in the direction of a good idea than a fully-realized piece of work. Given all of the bland professionalism on display, it is little surprise that the aspects of the production that stick out most are those that are the least successful, like fight director Rick Sordelet’s strangely ham-fisted stage violence.

The end result is a mediocre production of an ambitious but disappointing play, a play unlikely to find an audience. With Theatre for a New Audience’s sky-high ticket prices (unless you are under 25) and a steadily mounting collection of negative reviews, Bandele’s well-intentioned adaptation of Southerne’s well-intentioned adaptation of Behn’s well-intentioned novel provides little more than, well, good intentions.

Sound and Fury

Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double has exerted immeasurable influence on recent generations of theatre practitioners and scholars. His “Theatre of Cruelty,” derived from surrealism, focuses on spectacle, gesture, and ritual, rejecting both psychological realism and the primacy of text, and seeks to overwhelm the audience with a multisensory experience that will free them from their quotidian state of mind. As a theorist, he is widely considered to be one of the two most important figures in twentieth-century theatre (the other being Bertolt Brecht.) As a playwright and director, however, Artaud is generally considered to have been less successful. The Cenci, his loose adaptation of a nineteenth century verse tragedy by Percy Shelley, ran for less than two weeks in 1935 and was a commercial disaster. The reasons for this failure are the subject of significant disagreement: perhaps the audience was not ready for Artaud’s revolutionary staging techniques, or perhaps Artaud was not able to, on his first attempt, realize his vision for the Theatre of Cruelty. On stage, The Cenci seems to have been received as a hybrid of tragedy and Grand Guignol and audiences rejected it soundly. The production’s notoriety, along with a notoriously stiff translation into English by British surrealist Simon Watson Taylor, have imbued the play itself with the forbidding air of one of the greatest flops in theatrical history.

John Jahnke’s company Hotel Savant has set out to redress this state of affairs by securing the rights to the first American translation of Artaud’s Cenci and incorporating the aesthetics of Cruelty into the postmodern staging paradigm that owes so much to Artaud’s theoretical writings.

There is much to admire in this new production, including Richard Sieburth’s clever new translation, which inserts some much needed irony and humor into the stilted text; Kristin Worrall’s densely layered and sophisticated sound design; Peter Ksander’s simultaneously spare and complex set, which transforms the Ohio Theatre into a sort of maze for both audience and performers; Jahnke’s elaborate and fluid staging, with simultaneous action and metatheatrical flourishes that update many of Artaud’s ideas; and mostly compelling performances from a skilled and physically beautiful cast. There is little question that this team of collaborators have given their all with this production, and that most of them feel they are working on something special and possibly even important.

The problem is that the play, despite Sieburth’s considerable efforts, just isn’t very good. Artaud wanted to de-emphasize the text in his work, foregrounding the sensory, real-time impact of liveness on stage, but The Cenci is still a text-based play and therefore the text needs to provide a strong foundation for the production. Instead, it feels like the product of a fevered adolescent imagination, perhaps an adolescent who had only recently discovered the writings of the Marquis de Sade. This kind of work has its charm when framed as a B-budget horror film but when presented with the self-importance of ground-breaking theatre it collapses under the weight of its grand pomposity.

The story of The Cenci, inspired by a real-life family of sixteenth-century Italian nobility, is a lurid one. Francesco Cenci (Anthony Torn), the family’s patriarch, is a licentious libertine who abuses his family and servants psychologically and physically. When some in the family report his crimes, which include an incestuous relationship with his daughter Beatrice, he is treated leniently by the papal authorities and subsequently removes his family to a castle outside of Rome, where they take matters into their own hands and murder him rather than continue to live under his tyranny. The crime is discovered and the family are put to death.

The sensational and scandalous tale of the Cenci family has been the subject of novels, plays, operas and films by artists ranging from Stendhal, to Dumas, to Hawthorne. The problem with Artaud’s version is that his oft-stated rejection of simplistic psychology and specifically character-driven motivations lead him to embrace the idea of Evil with a capital “E,” an idea that is meant to make the story something more but paradoxically makes it seem smaller and somehow absurd. Even if an audience were to embrace the suspect idea that Evil is a primal force, it is unlikely that any actor or actors could successfully embody such an abstraction, even when aided by sound and light and gesture. The power of the story of The Cenci is that it really happened; attempting to elevate to the realm of the “universal,” Artaud instead rendered it kind of silly.

Still, for theatre history enthusiasts, Hotel Savant’s production represents a unique opportunity. It is unlikely that another rendition of Artaud’s play will pass our way any time soon. It is well-worth the $18 price of admission to witness a skilled and enthusiastic ensemble grappling with one of theatre’s most ambitious failures.

Never Again

There is a formula to narratives about the Holocaust and other moments of historical trauma. The opening scenes are charming, with a fair amount of comedy. The protagonist has a sense of humor, has struggled to achieve some success despite difficult odds, and has a core group of people who love him and are loved in return. Generally, our hero is shown to have some flaws: a tendency towards marital infidelity, perhaps. These flaws humanize him and make him more sympathetic. These relatively light-hearted moments are punctuated by moments of foreboding, reminding us of the tragic turn the story is about to take. Then the Nazis arrive, aided all too often by some of our hero’s friends and neighbors. Sympathy, guilt, remorse, and sadness follow, usually mitigated by a note of inspiration, nostalgia, and hope for the future.

Fabrik: The Legend of Moritz Rabinowitz, written and directed by the young theater company Wakka Wakka Productions, does not stray far from this time-tested formula and, indeed, audiences will find little that is unfamiliar in the script’s approach to history. Moritz Rabinowitz was a Polish émigré living in Norway, where he built a successful business and raised a family. He loved his adopted country and considered himself a patriot. He was also a vocal and articulate opponent of the wave of anti-semitism sweeping Europe. When the Nazis invaded Norway, he was captured and imprisoned in a Sachsenhausen, where he was reportedly beaten to death in 1942.

The spin on this iteration of the Holocaust tale, aside from its Norwegian setting, is the medium of the performance. Wakka Wakka’s inventive staging techniques, built around their Henson-ish puppets, supply a great deal of the charm of the production. The playfulness and virtuosity with which they explore the aesthetic and technical tools at their disposal make the story itself seem more unique than it otherwise might.

Three of Wakka Wakka’s four core company members serve as the cast: David Arkema, Kirjan Waage, and Gwendolyn Warnock (Gabrielle Brechner is the fourth member.) While it would be easy to write that the puppets (designed by Waage) are the stars of this production, the truth is that the puppets in and of themselves are not extraordinary; what impresses in this production is the implementation of the puppets, the skill and ingenuity with which they are employed.

In the opening scene, the Rabinowitz puppet is manipulated bunraku-style by all three performers (one controlling the head and right arm, one the left arm, and one the feet.) As new characters are introduced, the puppeteers split off from one another; the number of puppeteers controlling each puppet varies thereafter depending on the number of characters on stage and the technical demands of a given scene. Sometimes the performers are focused on the puppet, their faces turned in so as to deflect the attention of the audience. At other moments, the performers are face-out, drawing attention to themselves and to their medium as they perform alongside the puppets they control. Dream sequences, domestic scenes, song and dance numbers, political speeches, dances, violence, and transport by cars and boats are all depicted in the course of the play’s 85 minutes.

The small cast skillfully portrays a variety of characters in scenes both spoken and sung. Indeed, the Wakka Wakka ensemble prove to be more skillful actors than they are writers, clearly delineating characters that are somewhat flat in the script. While the story is powerful and the production impressive, the script does sometimes feel a little thin. While admirably avoiding the traps of self-importance and melodramatic excess, the writers have created only one fully-fleshed character; the rest are sketches.

Given that we have seen variations on this story so many times, it might well be asked why we need to see this one too. The answer lies, in part, in the somber promise to “never forget” but also extends into the story’s resonance with contemporary geopolitics. Two quotations in the program stand out in this regard. One is from former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who pointed out that even as we’ve made “never again” into a kind of mantra, genocide has proven alarmingly recurrent. The other is from Rabinowitz himself, who wrote in 1933 that “political isolationism, hatred, and the closing of borders are to blame for much of the tragedy in today’s world.”

Lost in the Funhouse

Before launching into “The Dreams of Laura Bush,” one of two-and-a-half monologues that constitute Wake Up!, Karen Finley took a moment to describe herself. As she walked from the downstage podium to the upstage desk, arranging papers and garments beneath a camera that projected image onto a screen behind her, she proclaimed: “I’m Joan Collins with a conscience.”

“I’m Britney Spears with an education.”

“I’m Liza Minelli with a Happy Family.”

These descriptions got laughs, of course, but none of them captures who Karen Finley is or, more accurately, who she presents herself to be.

After entering to applause on the night I saw her, Finley made some casual remarks to the audience, dedicating the evening’s performance to her students. Because the space is small, she had no need of a microphone, but a loud fan in the back of the audience area made it difficult to hear her. When someone complained she stepped forward and apologized, asked if the fan could be turned off, suggested that people move closer (“Oh here, this is an excellent seat,”) etc. After going through this apparently spontaneous exchange, however, Finley reassured us that we wouldn’t have any problem hearing her now that she was about to begin in earnest.

She was right. As she launched into her prologue, a short monologue about a woman who seeks out amputee veterans for sexual trysts, her voice was rich with chest resonance and easily filled the room. Was her somewhat discombobulated entrance, her initially timid voice, her attempt to quiet the room and bring the audience forward just an act, then? Or her occasional self-deprecating remarks about not being “that good an actress?” Figuring out how to read Karen Finley as a performer and as a persona are a significant part of the experience of watching Wake Up!

The two monologues that make up the body of this performance are “The Dreams of Laura Bush” and “The Passion of Terri Schiavo.” For the first of these, Finley speaks as our current First Lady, presenting pages from her personal dream diaries. The dreams range in subject matter from Condoleeza Rice having an affair with the President to Laura organizing a fictional “Dependent Film Festival” in Crawford, Texas, to a fragmented reimagining of Saddam Hussein’s hanging, to a sexual fantasy about Tony Blair. Other “dreams” are less cohesive or are just partial glimpses of images. The pages from the dream journal are drawings and sketches that Finley arranges on a desk and that are projected onto a screen behind her. The dreams form a house of mirrors of the Bush administration and of our current national moment.

In “The Passion of Terri Schiavo,” Finley steps in and out of several characters, each of them projecting their personal narratives and causes onto Schiavo’s body. Some of it is moving, some of it is funny, and some of it is intentionally offensive. The common thread between these voices is that all of them, under the guise of caring about Schiavo, are really airing their own passions, their own fears, their own guilt, looking to an image of a dying woman to be their information-age messiah. “I’ve never met her,” one of the characters says, “but I love her.” Ultimately, Finley conludes, "Terri needs her own reality TV show."

Despite Finley’s image as a polarizing figure, a reputation born from her famous court battle with the NEA in the early nineties, there is very little polemicism on display in Wake Up! Instead, it is a show by and about someone who is trying to make sense of our baffling political and cultural present. I was neither as taken with the performance as the woman to my left (another reviewer), who laughed uproariously for most of the evening, nor as puzzled as the man to my right (my guest for the evening), who wasn’t sure what to make of Finley at all. Instead, I felt a sympathy for an artist trying to work in a narrative form when the world she’s portraying seems to have lost its coherency. However, whether you love her, hate her, or are not sure what to make of her, you will leave Wake Up! with little doubt that there is no other performer quite like Karen Finley.

About a Boy

Sex is natural. Repression is bad. Ignorance is dangerous. Poverty is deadly. Patriarchy is oppressive. These and other less-than-revelatory assertions are at the heart of Good Heif, a coming-of-age tale with an avant-garde patina that is currently enjoying its premiere as part of the New Georges 2007-2008 season. Unfortunately, generally strong staging and admirable performances cannot save the text from its undercurrent of condescension and self-congratulation.

Formed in 1992, New Georges' mandate is to encourage the work of female theatre artists. Over the course of fifteen years, the company has produced a number of notable premieres and helped to launch the careers of an impressive array of aspiring playwrights. Given the company’s mission statement Good Heif is a self-consciously playful selection, as its narrative is structured around the sexual awakening of an adolescent male. The trials of a pubescent male in a patriarchal society, as rendered by a playwright and a director who are both women and presented by a famously feminist theatre company: this seems to have all the makings of a provocative, subversive piece of gender-political theater.

Instead, Brooklyn-based playwright Maggie Smith has written about “men” in a generalized “rural” setting, constructing the rural male as “other” in a way that feels dismissive and often mean-spirited. “If only these idiot characters of mine could see what I and my laudably sophisticated/liberated audience see, they would stop oppressing the earth, themselves, and each other,” she seems to say. To be fair, Smith is apparently aiming for something “universal” here, but universalizing often results in the reductive rather than the enlightening, and her play is no exception.

Good Heif is set on a vaguely defined barren landscape, rendered by set designer Lauren Helpern to look kind of like the cracked-desert photograph on the cover of Midnight Oil’s 1987 Blue Sky Mining. The characters dig into the dry earth, although they do not seem certain what it is they are digging for, and it is later revealed that they fear and suppress the rare instances of water bubbling to the surface. Off in the distance are trees with leaves, and what should be the promise of a more fertile life, but the desert locals demonize that place, calling it “over thar” and suspect that may be where the “divul” makes his home.

Lad (Christopher Ryan Richards) is alarmed to find that his body is changing and asks Pa (John McAdams) if he is becoming a man. The most visible sign of Lad’s impending manhood is the show’s primary visual gag: his persistent erection. Pa advises Lad to relieve his sexual longing with a heifer until he can find a suitable woman, and equates sex with digging into a hole in the ground. Ma (Barbara Pitts) is not to be told about these changes in her son; she is a hard-working but sickly woman and such news might push her over the edge.

Lad meets a mysterious feminine creature (April Matthis) who may or may not be the devil his parents have warned him about. She is from “over thar,” and while she doesn’t know what sex is either, she is far more open to finding out, and to exploring both Lad and the world with an open curiosity. Culture clashes, exorcisms, beatings, and coming-of-age ensue.

Director Sarah Cameron Sunde has crafted a visually compelling production and worked with her actors to create a cohesive and consistent ensemble. The performers in general are disciplined and energetic, committing to the seamless and concrete realization of this rather abstracted world. The program notes mention that Good Heif has had a long rehearsal process and incorporated a variety of techniques, and the admirable ensemble work onstage demonstrates the benefits of such a process.

All of this praiseworthy work, however, cannot obscure the intellectual laziness of the text. Smith has tried to infuse her play with a great deal of humor, but all of the jokes are ultimately at the expense of her characters. The audience are invited to laugh along with her as she chastises their ignorance and stubbornness; their fears are shown to be destructive, yes, but are also presented as so ridiculous and unfathomable that we simply judge their actions rather than seek solutions for change.

Publicity materials for Good Heif state that Smith’s “language is spare, simple and straightforward” but that “the life beneath the language is complicated, gnarled, and dangerous.” This may very well have been the intent of the play and the production, but there is little “complicated” or “dangerous” about inviting the audience to pat themselves on their backs for their enlightened views while laughing scornfully at those who live in fear of themselves, of each other, and of the world around them.

Borges, Brontë, and Butoh

The source material for SoGoNo's new Art of Memory is a heady mix. In a single publicity-related paragraph, the company mentions Frances Yates's 1966 "The Art of Memory," Giulio Camillo's 16th-century "Memory Theater," Jorge Luis Borges's 1941 story "The Library of Babel," the Brothers Grimm, and Emily Brontë. Adding all this to the fact that the company draws heavily on the techniques and strategies of the Japanese dance form butoh undoubtedly risks alienating some potential audience members who might already be skeptical of a show about "four librarians trapped in a fantastical library" who "search for an exit and create elaborate physical games that explore memory and illusion."

I am happy to report that the result is as engaging as it is mystifying, and that the pleasures of watching SoGoNo perform are almost as multifaceted as the material that went into the performance. Art of Memory is dense without seeming ponderous, introspective without seeming self-indulgent, and funny without seeming snide.

Of course, because I am one of those people who found the publicity material enticing rather than off-putting, my recommendation might be considered suspect. My guest at the performance, however, was familiar with almost none of the source material, had read none of the publicity, and acknowledged having never seen any performance remotely like this one. All I told him about the show in advance was that it fell under the vague category of "experimental." Because he was so taken with Art of Memory, I feel comfortable recommending it not only to those who think a butoh-derived meditation on Camillo and Jorge Borges sounds like a great idea but also to those who don't know who either of those people is.

While the audience filtered into the theater, a librarian whose dark clothes contrasted starkly with her chalky white makeup scurried along a balcony above the stage, apparently performing a ritual of some kind, preparing the space for what was to come. As the show began, three more women appeared, these dressed in frilly white frocks out of a Victorian storybook. They danced, chanted, and read aloud, surrounded by columns of books. Occasionally the balcony librarian, a ringmaster of sorts, would introduce new elements to spur the games and dances of the three women onstage. She might initiate a story that required call and response, or she might toss books like grenades down onto the stage.

This is a sometimes inscrutable piece, but the fragments and layers have clear connections that make the whole feel cohesive and accessible. The stories presented, some live and some recorded, all center around forbidden knowledge and transgressed boundaries. Again and again, young women are punished for seeking knowledge, objects, and spaces that their parents, lovers, and husbands have forbidden them.

As events progress, third-person stories shift into first-person memories, blurring the line between memory and fiction and suggesting that they are often indistinguishable from one another. Were the fictions reflections of traumatic experiences? Were real-world resentments and eccentricities the result of emotional responses to archetypal stories?

What elevates all of this above the level of self-indulgent introspection and renders it disarmingly entertaining is the precision, passion, and artistry of the performers, designers, composers, and technicians. SoGoNo Artistic Director Tanya Calamoneri and her collaborators have gathered a great deal of material that clearly resonates for them personally. The decision to construct a piece about the creative act of memory does not come across as having been pretentious or presumptuous, but as the result of a quest for a very personal kind of insight.

What is it about these stories, these ideas, that captured their imaginations? Why did an image of the Brontë sisters trapped in Borges's library/universe seem so right? Rather than attempt a reductive response to these questions, SoGoNo has crafted an athletic, compact, and often hypnotic exploration of them, inviting audiences to engage with the material on their own terms and participate in the creation of new memories, even as they ponder the nature of those already recorded.

Prisoners and Players

The assault on the audience came almost immediately upon entrance to the theater. As we squeezed our way into the tightly packed seats, large men, several of them naked, glared at us while they finished getting dressed under the baleful gaze of armed guards. There was no way to avoid making eye contact with the prisoners, some of whom furtively poked their fingers through the chain-link structure separating them from the audience, others of whom stared angrily outward. These looks, desperate or threatening, continued throughout the performance, even while "great men" debated how best to serve "the people." The people themselves stared out at the audience, daring us to really see them.

Peter Weiss's dauntingly titled The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, published in 1963, is one of the genuine triumphs of 20th-century drama. Peter Brook's seminal 1964 production by the Royal Shakespeare Company, which came to New York and won several Tonys in 1966, is widely considered a triumph as well, and has become so closely associated with the play that the two seem almost inextricable.

Given the large cast, the demanding text, and the shadow of an unforgettable production, it shouldn't be surprising that the play is rarely produced professionally, despite its importance. Still, it is something of a shock to read that Marat/Sade has not received a major production in New York in 40 years. Theatergoers should therefore not miss the opportunity to see Classical Theater of Harlem's audacious new staging, playing now through March 11.

This new production, directed by CTH co-founder Christopher McElroen, isn't perfect, but it is both riveting and challenging. Most impressive, it is relentlessly and gloriously uncomfortable to watch, reminding us that theater is capable of a great deal more than soothingly diverting entertainment.

Inspired by a provocative piece of history, the play's plot is evident in its title. The infamous Marquis de Sade spent the final years of his life in an asylum for the criminally insane. As a part of the progressive treatment offered there, he was sometimes allowed to write and produce plays, with the other inmates as actors. While the plays Sade actually wrote while in captivity were rather apolitical and not particularly transgressive by the period's standards, Weiss imagines that Sade wrote a play about the assassination of prominent French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat. As the play-within-the-play moves inexorably toward Marat's stabbing by Charlotte Corday, it also allows time for Sade to debate his fictionalized Marat about a variety of philosophical and political issues.

The play's structure and content are complex enough to defy easy summary, and McElroen's production stumbles when he attempts to distract the audience from this complexity. While Sade and Marat toss barbed abstractions across the stage, McElroen creates easy laughs with the spectacle of the inmates struggling to behave themselves. The moments are charming and diverting, but they take away from the seriousness of the debate under way. To be fair, Marat and, especially, Sade are given more and more focus as the play progresses. Layers of irony and absurdity are stripped away until Weiss's severely wounded idealism is rendered in all its cynicism and vitriol.

For the most part, the actors handle themselves well. Certainly T. Rider Smith, as Sade, gives a compelling and layered performance, alternately controlled and raw. Dana Watkins deftly delivers a performance within a performance—as a narcoleptic inmate playing the murderous Corday—with a level of craft that ultimately manages to overshadow his considerable physical beauty. More impressive than the standout performances from some of the leads, however, is the commitment and discipline displayed by most of the ensemble. The images that lingered longest in my memory were not of Sade's self-mutilation or Jacques Roux's (Andrew Guilart) histrionics but of the haunted and haunting stares of the ensemble.

The press notes for Marat/Sade do not mention the play's political underpinnings, but even in a production that shies away from Weiss's more cerebral tendencies, the prisoners' despair shimmers with contemporary resonance. An inmate cries, "We talk about freedom, but who is this freedom for?" before being struck down unceremoniously by abusive guards.

Propagandistic optimism about Napoleon's disastrous final war and the triumphant march of progress is sprinkled throughout the play. Alarmingly, it becomes increasingly indistinguishable from presidential press conferences. As the music swells and the prisoners revolt, 1803, 1966, and 2007 converge, and spectators are left to wonder whether they are to blame and whether there's anything they can do to stop history's cyclical march.

Sound and Vision

Folk-rock singer-songwriter Cameron Seymour converted to Sufi Islam and became a vocal critic of U.S. politics and consumerism. She subsequently became convinced that she was being monitored by various government agencies and developed a reputation for paranoid rants and emotional breakdowns during her performances. After staging a farewell concert for her given name, she disappeared and was rumored to have moved to Morocco, though she was never heard from again. Years later, her daughter Mary, who had been adopted by Seymour's manager, Burt Fern, set out to come to terms with her mother's disappearance and document both Moroccan Sufism and the concert that marked her mother's final public appearance.

Actually, none of this ever happened. But if it had, it would have made a compelling subject for a documentary. As a fiction, it would make a compelling subject for the increasingly popular faux-documentary genre. Set loose in real time and in three dimensions on the stage at St. Ann's Warehouse, it has become Must Don't Whip 'Um, a fascinating and highly entertaining hybrid of genres and media, written and composed by Cynthia Hopkins and featuring her real-life band, Gloria Deluxe.

Much about Must Don't Whip 'Um is difficult to describe, but it is essentially a theatrical staging of a fictional documentary film. Because the "film" in question has a rock concert as its primary subject, the show is also a musical performance. Between songs, there are voice-over segments, montages of still images, and clips of backstage bickering, all projected above the stage but all filmed in real time. Sometimes the filming takes place in full view of the audience and sometimes it is partially obscured, as in the scenes that are filmed against a green screen just offstage. The flatness of the screens is offset by the physical presence of the actors, as well as the diaphanous curtains and shimmering lights that dominate the production design.

This intentional division of the audience's focus allows for some clever effects. Early on, an argument between Seymour and her manager takes place first offstage and then onstage, and is simultaneously projected as video. The placement of the cameras and the way the image is edited cause the performers to appear to be facing each other onscreen when their backs are turned to each other onstage, and vice versa.

What is most remarkable about the production is that even with all the cleverness, all the nested layers of narrative, all the techno-fetishism, and all the coy flirtation with politics and cultural criticism, the result never feels flip or self-congratulatory. It is a rare achievement when a show with this much going on conceptually is so affecting and emotionally engaging.

While the very concept of the production is soaked in irony, Hopkins performs with such conviction and commitment that Must Don't Whip 'Um is simultaneously a parody of the faux-documentary form and a tribute to the real thing. Even as Hopkins is poking fun at self-important musicians with messianic aspirations, she also seems to be exploring the elusive mystique and charisma that drew her to take such figures as her subject in the first place.

The music is unquestionably the heart of this production, with songs that sound like a cross between the Mamas and the Papas and Antony and the Johnsons. Indeed, if Antony and his peers are in your music collection, you should probably check out Gloria Deluxe, regardless of whether you make it to St. Ann's Warehouse to see the show.

In their publicity materials, the producers at St. Ann's state their intention to present and produce "innovative theater and concert presentations that meet at the intersection of theater and rock 'n' roll." Given that focus, the hyper-theatrical brand of hipster rock epitomized by Hopkins and her band seems to have found the ideal venue.

Must Don't Whip 'Um is the second in a series of shows that make up a larger narrative. While I didn't catch the first installment, Accidental Nostalgia, I have no intention of missing whatever Hopkins comes up with next.

Sound Designed

Describing the various elements that serve as aural, visual, thematic, and narrative layers of Radiohole's Fluke doesn't come close to conveying the experience of watching the show. A fragmented, surrealist riff on Moby-Dick, this piece is less about great whales and existential crises than the explosive energy, theatrical ingenuity, and collaborative spirit of Radiohole's work. The result is a welcome shot of adrenaline into the heart of New York's avant-garde theater. An image of swirling bubbles is projected onto an upstage screen. What sounds like two separate recordings of bubbling water—one light and constant, one deeper and more sporadic—moves through the theater's powerful speaker system, reinforcing the idea that the show takes place on and under the water. Adding another level to the soundscape, and slyly complicating the distinction between live and recorded performance, are the lamps lining the walls. They are submerged in fixtures that are filled with colored water, gurgling and bubbling with a sonic texture that is more "present" than the recordings.

Four actors—three (Eric Dyer, Erin Douglass, and Maggie Hoffman) onstage and one (Scott Halvorsen Gillette) broadcast onto a video monitor suspended over a corner of the proscenium—act out a variety of monologues, dialogues, and physical scenarios. Their voices are almost always amplified, so that the voices of the actors onstage have the same quality as the disembodied Gillette. The voices are usually assigned individual speakers, however, so they come from the general direction of the actors and provide spatial orientation.

One radically, and intentionally, disorienting use of sound is made possible by a remarkable device called an Audio Spotlight. Designed for use in convention centers and other large, multi-exhibit environments, this flat, round speaker projects sound in a narrow field so that only those in front of it can hear it. Radiohole has mounted the Spotlight above the stage and set it in a motorized pattern that sweeps the audience. Segments of Fluke are divided by whispered passages of text consisting mostly of latitudes and longitudes; the whispered voice sounds as if it is moving through the auditorium.

The effect sent a chill down my spine a couple of times, as a word or phrase seemed to be whispered in my ear, but mostly it gave me a geeky, gadget-lover's thrill. Most significant, perhaps, are its implications for future experiments. Theater is often described as an inherently communal experience, but this idea is provocatively subverted if different audience members can be made to hear different things at any given time.

Roughly halfway through the performance, the actors sit in a row, close their eyes, and paint new "eyes" on their eyelids. After this, they perform most of the show with their eyes closed. Because we are witness to the application of the "eyes," the illusion is funnier and creepier. We see that the characters can "see," but know that the actors cannot. In some of the show's best moments, these crudely cartoonish "eyes" are unsettlingly convincing.

While most of the show is relatively meditative (if absurdist and surreal) in tone, two or three segments shatter the atmosphere with a rock-concert energy. Distorted guitars blast almost too loudly over the speakers while actors swing across the stage on suspended ropes or hunt for whales with golf balls instead of harpoons.

The show has no single director or designer; instead, the company members seem to have made every decision collaboratively, resulting in a radically democratized aesthetic that stands in marked contrast to the auteurist, guru-driven work of most avant-garde performances. Similarly, the sound, lights, and projections are controlled by the actors onstage. Much of the spectacle of Radiohole's work is watching the performers create every aspect of the piece. While a number of topical asides are sprinkled throughout the text, this hyper-saturated brand of collaboration is the show's most political statement.

Fluke also incorporates a fair amount of lowbrow humor alongside its highbrow literary and philosophical references. Other laughs come not so much from actual jokes as from delightfully absurd images and actions. The subject of the text seems to be alienation, disaffection, and despair. Because the performers are already making fun of themselves on some level, they are able to defuse any potential charge of pretentiousness. This might be viewed as something of a cynical defense strategy, but the show never feels cynical.

What seems to motivate all of the disparate elements and devices is Radiohole's fierce love for and dedication to its work. Yes, the contemporary world is exhausting, and yes, "meaning" is as elusive as Ahab's white whale. But the inexplicable optimism invoked in the show's final monologue is made possible by the fact that four very smart adults can still entertain themselves and their audience by getting really loud and playing with toys. Free beer, toy fish, and a little noise go a long way toward making a gloomy world seem a little brighter.

The Playwright's New Clothes

For the critic in search of a catchy opening paragraph, a title like Israel Horovitz's New Shorts is a terrible temptation. The inevitable parallel, of course, is to "The Emperor's New Clothes," in which the titular head of state is allowed to walk naked before a baffled and tittering public that is too afraid to tell him his new "clothes" exist only in his mind. Horovitz is not an emperor, but he is a significant and well-established playwright who has generously agreed to collaborate with a scrappy, young Off-Off Broadway company for a season of new work. My suspicion upon entering the theater—particularly given confusion over who was supposed to tear tickets, a late start, and similar telltale symptoms of a disorganized opening night—was that the production was not going to live up to the script's potential. I fully expected to give a supportive review, forgiving the foibles of a company in over its head while praising the new work of a sometimes neglected figure in American drama.

Instead, Barefoot Theater Company surprised me with an evening of consistently strong performances that tended to outshine a series of disappointing plays. If the emperor has no clothes, as the hook-seeking critic wants to write, then the playwright has no shorts.

Typically, though, the truth is a little more subtle than that. The nine short plays that make up this new evening of theater are not bad by any stretch of the imagination. They are sometimes funny, sometimes infuriating, sometimes touching, and sometimes challenging.

"The Bridal Play" explores the inner secrets of a roomful of wedding-goers by juxtaposing their words to one another with a series of interior monologues. "Affection in Time" is meta-theater cum science fiction, a message from a playwright in a distant time. "The Fat Guy Gets the Girl" is pretty much what it sounds like, only sweeter. "Beirut Rocks" traps several students in a hotel during the recent Israel-Lebanon conflict, their diversity accommodating an uncomfortable allegory about regional and world politics.

In "Audition Play," an Off-Off Broadway director gives a single mother a second chance to tap-dance her way through an Actors' Equity showcase. "The Hotel Play" finds a jilted "other woman" falling for a charming male prostitute. "Inconsolable" is a poetic meditation on loss and desperation. "Cat Lady" is a character study of an aging woman with a fragmented past. "The Race Play," like "The Bridal Dance," brings all nine actors onstage, this time as celebrity runners at a charity race.

Most of these short plays are well done, but none of them lives up to the promise of Horovitz's Line or Park Your Car in Harvard Yard, or The Indian Wants the Bronx, or any of the other plays (and screenplays) that have emerged from his career and made him, as his biography in the program trumpets, "the most-produced American playwright in French theater history." "Not bad" isn't what one expects from a playwright with such a pedigree.

What Israel Horovitz's New Shorts seems to be is a series of classroom exercises by someone much further along in his craft and his career than the typical playwriting student. Indeed, one can imagine Mr. Horovitz, who has frequently taught both playwriting and screenwriting at such prestigious venues as Columbia University, giving a series of "what if" scenarios to his students, mixing and matching formal restrictions and requiring a finished, 10-minute result by the end of the week. Wouldn't it be tempting, sometimes, for the professor/playwright to take part in such exercises himself?

While the pace sometimes lagged, resulting in a somewhat longer run time than the advertised 90 minutes, the production itself was mostly charming. Nine actors, arranging themselves in various configurations to play the multitude of roles demanded by nine very different plays, met the demands of the evening with energy, grace, and charm.

Both Michael LoPorto and Horovitz himself directed their portions of the production with efficiency and intelligence, allowing their actors to shine but wisely steering them clear of self-indulgent histrionics. The nature of the show meant that design elements had to be kept to a minimum, but the creative team all worked within its considerable constraints to create a fluid production design that felt minimal by design rather than because of financial limitations.

Still, despite the considerable charms of "The Hotel Play" and "The Race Play" and the intentionally controversial and agitating politics of "Beirut Rocks," Israel Horovitz's New Shorts doesn't add up to much more than a series of thematic and formal experiments by a playwright treading water between projects of more substance.

Dancing With Giants

Because not everything I'm about to write about Bread and Puppet Theater and its new show, The Battle of the Terrorists and the Horrorists, is positive, I want to be sure to say upfront that I think you should go see this company during its brief annual visit to Theater for the New City. In fact, I'm recommending that you see it next year and the year after that, and every year that Peter Schumann's health, Bread and Puppet's solvency, and the seemingly inexhaustible supply of local volunteers allow the company to bring its unique brand of theater to New York. Even after more than 40 years, there is simply no other theater group quite like this. In keeping with its street theater and outdoor circus roots, Bread and Puppet welcomed audience members outside Theater for the New City's First Avenue entrance with a brass band led by what appeared to be a Salvation Army Santa Claus. When the band marched inside, the show was about to begin—a more exuberant approach than just blinking the lights in the lobby.

Once the audience members had taken their seats, a master of ceremonies welcomed us and introduced the premise of the show with the aid of illustrated placards. Recent history has been dominated by a war between the Terrorists and the Horrorists. These two groups look different but are suspiciously similar beneath their costumes. They both believe in good and bad, concepts that are "dialectically meaningless." There is a God of Everything and a God of Nothing, both played by the same actor/dancer (Schumann, the company's director). Their witnesses, their victims, and their enablers are the cardboard citizenry, represented by a dozen or so volunteers in white costumes. They hold up cardboard cutouts, implying that "the people" have been rendered two-dimensional by the reductive rhetoric of good and evil. Other allegorical figures are represented by Schumann's trademark giant puppets.

Much of what ensued was clever. Some of it was breathtakingly beautiful. The overall concept, though, was disappointingly schematic and not illuminating. Three white puppets, apparently functioning as Fate-like sisters, turned the wheel of history. A plane was used as a weapon. A war ensued. The cardboard citizenry read about these events in the news and occasionally stomped its feet or danced in circles at the prompting of Schumann's God of Nothing.

Schumann's great talent is that the rough-hewn aesthetic of his puppet designs doesn't keep the puppets from dancing with extraordinary grace, and he himself remains a nimble and compelling performer. His ability to orchestrate these events in a short period of time, using local talent, is also admirable.

Still, for a show that began by attacking the simplistic ideology of both terrorism and the war on terror, the politics of The Battle of the Terrorists and the Horrorists presents a gratingly simple political vision in its own right. It's also worth noting that, while the lack of a program is meant in part to downplay the contribution of any given individual and emphasize the collective nature of Bread and Puppet's communal approach to art, society, and bread-making, no effort at all is made to de-emphasize Schumann's status as auteurist guru. Publicity materials for this production spend over a page detailing his accomplishments, his influences, and his personal history. Everyone else is just a cardboard citizen doing the work and dancing the dance assigned to them by their leader.

Bread and Puppet has been a major presence in agit-prop theater for decades, and much about its agenda and its operation is genuinely exciting. The whole-grain sourdough bread and pungent garlic-laden aioli, given out in a kind of secular communion after the performance, is delicious. Like all entrenched institutions, though, this company should be held accountable for any whiff of hypocrisy in its power dynamics or its politics, lest it become a reflection of the systems it decries.

Poor Soldier

Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, required reading for students of Western theater, is widely considered a precursor of both expressionism and Bertolt Brecht's epic drama. A dark and difficult play, it is frequently produced and almost as frequently disappointing in production. Having sat through far too many ambitious but tedious performances of the play, I am pleased to report that the Gate Theater London production, now playing at St. Ann's Warehouse, is highly entertaining, appropriately disturbing, exuberantly theatrical, and occasionally brilliant. Woyzeck's plot is episodic and elliptical, following the titular protagonist (Edward Hogg)—a soldier who must submit to medical experiments in order to provide (barely) enough food for his girlfriend and baby—through a series of indignities and his eventual descent into violence and despair. The play was discovered after Büchner's premature death in 1837 in an apparently unfinished state. The surviving text is a series of separate scenes that were left unnumbered, meaning it is the job of any director to determine the order in which they will be presented. While there is some dark humor inherent in the text, the overall atmosphere is relentlessly dark, and productions often suffer from a one-note gloominess.

Daniel Kramer has certainly not fallen into that trap in adapting and directing his own version of the play. For its first half, this production almost felt like Büchner as filtered through Monty Python and Benny Hill. Woyzeck rode a child's tricycle around the stage while Elvis sang over the theater's sound system. The sexual innuendo was played up in a wink-wink, nudge-nudge manner that initially belied the seriousness of both the issues being explored and Woyzeck's deteriorating mental state. Kramer filtered the text's carnivalesque surrealism through this lighthearted sensibility for perhaps a little too long.

Then, just as the production's self-aware cleverness was starting to grate on me, Kramer pulled the rug out from under the audience by indicting us for our enjoyment. In one of the production's centerpiece scenes, the Drum Major (David Harewood) beat Woyzeck senseless while preening and flirting with the audience. Harewood's winning smile and athletic presence allowed him to charm the audience despite the abhorrent nature of his actions. As the audience laughed and applauded the Drum Major, Woyzeck lay groaning on the ground. In a rebuke to our applause, he moaned, "Yay, violence." The moment brought another laugh, but it was also a recognition of our own culpability in the virulent brand of masculinity that led the Drum Major to batter his victim.

While the production's humor didn't disappear altogether after that, the tone shifted considerably. Fewer moments were played for laughs, and the violence was increasingly alarming. This tonal shift was achieved entirely through pacing and line delivery, while the show's visual and sonic aesthetic remained consistent. David Howe's exquisite lighting, often filtered through an onstage mist, worked to enhance Kramer's painterly staging. The production's visual beauty was juxtaposed with a soundtrack made up mostly of Elvis, Dolly Parton, and Beethoven as well as occasional sound effects that rendered individual moments alternately cartoonish and haunting. A number of moments were so gorgeously staged, they lingered in my memory as works of art unto themselves.

The performances were excellent throughout. Hogg's fragile, tormented Woyzeck and Hare's gleefully sadistic Drum Major were particularly memorable, but Roger Evans, Fred Pearson, Tony Guilfoyle, and Diana Payne-Myers also deserve mention as Andres, Captain, Doctor, and Grandmother, respectively.

Along with its virtuosity and occasional excesses, the production takes pains to underscore the text's thematic concerns. Exchanges of money are highlighted, the poverty and social standing of soldiers decried, and the highly destructive conflation of masculinity with violence is explored from a variety of angles.

This Woyzeck is not intended to be a "definitive" production, but as a provocative take on a canonical yet, paradoxically, unfinished text. As Kramer has noted, "The profundity of this play lies in its ruins." His singular excavation of these "ruins" is one of the season's most memorable evenings of theater.

Collage Effect

Matthew Maguire, now an Obie Award-winning actor and chairman of the Department of Theater and Visual Art at Fordham University, got his start in theater with an adaptation of Max Ernst's collage novel The Seven Deadly Elements, which was presented at La MaMa in 1977. Since that time, he has experimented with all manner of genres and media. In celebration of La MaMa's 45th anniversary, he has returned to collage with the exquisitely crafted, if occasionally inscrutable, Abandon. George Braque and Pablo Picasso are credited with having invented collage as part of their early cubist experiments. Considered by many to be one of the most significant developments in 20th-century art, collage involves the juxtaposition of fragments from various works in various media in order to create a new piece of art. The technique was quickly adopted by visual artists as well as narrative and performance artists. It has been argued that theater was a multimedia form centuries before the term "multimedia" was coined, and, as such, it seems uniquely situated to take advantage of collage techniques.

Maguire has applied the concept of collage in as many ways as possible to Abandon. The stage's back wall is made up of three large screens, onto which are projected a series of stunning collages by Maguire. Video images are often projected as well, setting the backgrounds of the stills in motion. This visual score is accompanied by Andrew Ingavet's original music, itself a collage of fragments from a variety of genres. Acoustic, orchestral, and electronic moments are pasted together, sometimes segueing smoothly and sometimes crashing together with intentionally jarring suddenness.

Against this prerecorded landscape, actors walk a stage divided into zones by lines taped on the floor. While the projections and the music provide a kind of emotional roadmap, the performers bring a more concrete narrative. The scenes combine experimental dance theater with straightforward dialogue, juxtaposing narrative techniques to create yet another level of collage. When the actors step behind the screens they become living shadow puppets, blurring the line between foreground and background.

Unlike much of Maguire's early work, Abandon has a fairly linear plot. Helena (Alexis McGuinness) is a young woman traumatized by the loss of her mother and by the failure of her parents' relationship. Her sister, Marguerite (Genevieve Odabe), sees Helena avoiding any kind of emotional intimacy and tries to help her. The story has details and twists and turns, but it really serves as a frame for a thematic exploration of male-female relationships, both filial and sexual. While invitations to dance initially serve as metaphorical attempts at intimacy, the dances eventually become violent. At one point, the war of the sexes is presented via slow-motion recreations of pro-wrestling moves.

Many of the techniques employed will be familiar to anyone who's been through a couple of acting classes in recent decades. Actors walk in grid-like patterns, exploring postures and gestures that change their height to represent their fluctuating power relationships, among other things. What are usually experienced as classroom exercises, though, here become a precisely choreographed and codified series of moving images. The advantages of a long rehearsal process with dedicated collaborators are in evidence throughout.

The night I attended Abandon, it was intriguing to note that few of those in attendance were responsive to the production's considerable humor. Most of the audience seemed to be involved with what was onstage (with the exception of one gentleman who snickered derisively at moments), but there was very little laughter. This may have been in part because the projected images—surreal, haunting, apocalyptic—had established an atmosphere that didn't encourage laughter. But I suspect it had more to do with the way many audiences perceive this kind of work in general.

Too often, experimental theater is assumed to take both its subjects and itself extremely seriously. Audiences may feel they are expected to sit in a state of hushed reverence at even the most absurd images. As often as not, this kind of work can be seen as pretentious: something looks or sounds ridiculous, but audience members think they're not supposed to laugh. My advice to attendees of this show (and of others in this vein): if the actor makes a funny face, or the situation seems absurd, or the music reminds you for a moment of Pee Wee Herman, it's probably supposed to be funny. There's no need to stifle your chuckle.

Ultimately, Abandon isn't for everyone, but no successful work of art is. For adventurous audiences looking for a unique evening of theater, it's well worth the price of admission, and a trip to the theater that is arguably the birthplace of Off-Off Broadway.

To Hell and Back

It's difficult to evaluate Les Freres Corbusier's production of Hell House with the usual tools of theater criticism. While there is a set and there are actors, and there is an episodic narrative of sorts, these usual points of reference for theater audiences and critics are almost beside the point. Hell House is as much anthropological exploration as theatrical production, and responses to it reveal more about the audience members at any given performance than they do about the aesthetic or even political agenda of the production itself. However you approach it, and whether you find it funny, frightening, or quaint, this is a unique experience for New York and promises to further solidify Les Freres Corbusier's position as one of the city's most buzz-worthy theater companies.

Apparently originated by Jerry Falwell in the 1970's, the Hell House tradition was formalized, gore-ified, and packaged for marketing by Keenan Roberts, senior pastor of an Assemblies of God affiliate in Colorado. Roberts has created an "outreach kit" to help individual churches and organizations set up their own Hell Houses. Kits include scripts, a sound effects CD, a DVD with samples of finished scenes, and advice on how to produce fake blood and aborted fetus parts. Thousands of Hell Houses spring up around the country every October. They are evangelically deconstructed haunted houses, with ghosts and goblins replaced by sinners and Satan.

Patrons are shuffled through a series of rooms by a demonic tour guide. The rooms depict a variety of sinful choices: date rape, abortion, drug use, gay weddings, suicide, and just plain secular humanism are some examples. Whenever possible, these scenes are drenched in stage blood. Eventually the tour leads to hell and then to heaven. The goal is to keep some of the fun and thrills of secular "haunted houses" while appealing to religious sensibilities and making the audience fear not only for their bodies but for their souls. Having been shaken by relatively graphic depictions of sinful lives, audience members are encouraged to join with a prayer partner and either convert to evangelical Christianity or reaffirm their faith. According to Roberts, his Hell Houses have a "33% Salvation rate."

While most Hell Houses are produced by churches and other religious organizations, this one has been produced by one of New York's trendiest young theater companies. Les Freres Corbusier has garnered significant attention over its first several years, most recently with 2005's Heddatron. The company has developed a reputation for creating contextually ironic work without overtly mocking its source material.

This approach has clearly informed its new production as well. While it would have been all too easy to drench Hell House in equal amounts of irony and stage blood, director Alex Timbers and company have tried to approach the material as straight-on as possible. In marked contrast to the controversial 2004 Hollywood Hellhouse, which featured Bill Maher and Andy Richter, among others, Les Freres Corbusier has tried to recreate the phenomenon rather than mock it. In fact, producer Aaron Lemon-Strauss, in a recent interview in The Gothamist, revealed that one of the only significant changes made to Roberts's script is that many of the intentional jokes have been removed for fear that audiences would assume these jokes had been inserted by the artistic team.

Of course, there is considerable irony built into the context of this production. A Hell House produced by a hip young theater company at one of the city's hippest performance spaces, for an audience mostly clad in black turtlenecks and NYU sweatshirts, is, inevitably, a decidedly secular experience. The production also resulted in the fascinating spectacle of skilled actors pretending to be amateur actors, a kind of double-performance that would not be present in a Bible Belt production. Intriguingly, the stilted delivery of the sometimes excruciating dialogue faded as the Hell Room approached. Just as the scenes were meant to be progressively more frightening, the anguish in the performers' voices became more and more genuine as the tour approached its climax.

The most notable change to the usual Hell House configuration is that Les Freres decided not to include a prayer and conversion room. Instead, the tour ended with a Christian rock band, punch, and powdered doughnuts. While this decision seems to have been made in a spirit of respect for religion, it rendered the concluding room all too comfortable for an audience already safely removed from the material. Whether they were disgusted or amused by the preceding spectacle, it would have been fascinating to see this audience confronted by earnest invitations to drink the proverbial punch (not just the Kool-Aid) and embrace the evangelism behind Roberts's creation.

Black and White

First produced in 1859, just two years before the dawn of the Civil War, Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon is a fascinating piece of theater history. It is an object of interest for a variety of reasons: the depiction of interracial romance in the age of slavery, the carefully balanced portrayal of North and South, and the first known onstage use of a camera, among them. A huge success at the time of its initial productions, the play is rarely performed now. This is in part because the tropes and structure of 19th-century melodrama lend the text a difficult to escape museum-theater mustiness. At its best, Alex Roe's production at the invaluable Metropolitan Playhouse overcame this creakiness, but it too often succumbed to the stiff formality of good-for-you art. Still, while "museum theater" is generally used as a derogatory term, museums are a crucial site of exploration for our shared cultural history.

The setting of the play is Terrebonne, a financially beleaguered plantation in Louisiana. Its owner having died, the plantation is about to be auctioned off in order to settle crippling debts. Mrs. Peyton (Wendy Merritt) is the widow of the judge who founded the plantation. Her nephew George (Michael Hardart) has recently arrived from Paris, where he has spent the past several years. Mrs. Peyton is worried about what will become of the life she has built at Terrebonne, and even more so about what will become of her remaining family members and slaves, for whom she has great affection.

Her greatest affection seems to be for Zoe (Margaret Loesser Robinson), the illegitimate daughter of the judge, whom Mrs. Peyton has graciously kept on as a member of the family. George is immediately attracted to Zoe, not realizing that she is an octoroon, the daughter of a slave woman who was herself of mixed race. It soon becomes clear that nearly every other man who passes through the plantation is smitten with her too.

Zoe's status as an object of forbidden desire drives the escalating crisis in the play. The villainous Jacob M'Closky (David Lamb), who has schemed his way to half-ownership of Terrabone, plans to buy the rest of the plantation at auction. Through a series of melodramatic devices, it is revealed that Zoe herself will be auctioned, her status as a freed woman invalidated by a legal complication and her chastity therefore threatened by M'Closky's machinations.

History lesson aside, the fun of the play is in the convoluted series of complications that drive the plot. Letters are found in hidden compartments, photographic evidence of a murder is discovered at the last possible moment, and romantic intrigues are pursued on wooded paths. Roe staged the action skillfully, never letting the small stage feel overcrowded by the large cast. The design elements, most notably Melissa Estro's costumes, effectively evoked the prewar South.

Stylistically, though, this production walked an uneasy line between the heightened theatricality of melodrama and a more naturalistic approach. The more successful moments were the larger ones. Women swooned and villains sneered. On the night I attended, several audience members were familiar enough with the form to add to the fun by audibly hissing when M'Closky revealed his despicable plot. Roe undoubtedly wanted us to feel for these characters and so toned down some of the more romantic scenes, but this resulted in an inconsistency of tone and pace.

The acting itself was somewhat uneven. Particularly strong were Wendy Merritt, charming as Mrs. Peyton, and Arthur Acuna as Wahnotee, a noble (but alcoholic) "savage." Acuna threw himself into the potentially offensive role with relish while winning both sympathy and laughter with the timing, grace, and physical discipline of an accomplished performer. Alia Chapman infused the relatively small role of Grace, one of Terrebonne's slaves, with a fierce focus and dignity. Mike Durkin, in an uneven performance as overseer Salem Scudder, delivered some of the production's finest moments.

A surprising number of the actors had trouble filling the intimate space vocally, and the dialect work was inconsistent. Several performers succumbed to the panicked flurry of overacting that tends to accompany barely remembered lines. I saw the opening night performance, and I am almost certain that this mostly strong cast will have settled more fully into their performances by now.

Despite its failings, The Octoroon remains a fascinating document of our cultural history and a chastening reminder that popular entertainment has often engaged courageously with the most difficult issues of any given time. This is the first installment of the Metropolitan Playhouse's "Black and White" season, a commendable project that deals not only with issues of race but also with the dangers and temptations of thinking about complex issues in absolute terms.

(A warning: the interesting program notes by dramaturge Peter Judd reveal the ending of the plot; you might not want to read them until after the show.)

Looking Forward, Looking Back

The work of Terayama Shuji, a Japanese playwright and filmmaker who died in 1983, has been widely neglected in the United States. Despite the controversies surrounding those works that did appear here, at venues like La MaMa and at various international theater and film festivals; despite his continuing cult figure status in Japan; and despite the museum bearing his name in Misawa City, he has remained a marginal figure in this country. His work—alternately nostalgic and iconoclastic, romantic and brutally transgressive—is considered by some to be simply too "Japanese" to be embraced in the States. Theater is not a mass medium, however, and the South Wing's new Death in Vacant Lot! doesn't need to capture the "public" imagination to achieve success on its own terms. DIVL! is based on Denen ni Shisu (variously translated as Death in the Fields, Death in the Country, and Cache Cache Pastoral), a 1974 film considered by many to be Terayama's masterpiece. Adapted, translated, and directed by South Wing Artistic Director Kameron Steele, it is a memorable calling card from a remarkable young company determined to carve itself a niche in 21st-century avant-garde theater.

Like the film on which it is based, DIVL! at first appears to be a surreal story about a young man, Lukas (Nate Schenkkan), and his frustrated desire to escape his provincial hometown. From a traveling circus to a midnight tryst with a next-door neighbor, Lukas's world is represented in a highly stylized and intensely theatrical manner. Actors play multiple roles, awaiting entrances and exchanging costume pieces in full view of the audience, stepping in and out of the onstage band, and providing sound effects for each other's mimed actions.

The plot and style explode, however, when it becomes clear that the play we are watching is the creation of the same man 30 years later (Chris Oden). The adult Lukas is making a film about his coming of age but is dissatisfied with and skeptical of the way his fictionalized past has been presented. (It is unclear why this wasn't reframed as a play within a play rather than a suspiciously play-like film within a play.) He dismisses his cast and sets out to examine his memories, and these framing moments are presented in a far more naturalistic style than the carnival-esque memory sequences.

The narrative threads twist together when child Lukas and adult Lukas confront each other and attempt to rewrite history by engaging in the unstable and creative process of memory. Young Lukas is sent back to act out more "accurate" scenes from the author's remembered past and, ultimately, to try to radically revise it. If author and character can fundamentally alter their shared memory, can they subsequently alter the present and future as well?

This all sounds like heady and potentially pretentious stuff, but, with very few exceptions, Steele keeps the action surprisingly entertaining even as he delves into the philosophical vagaries of Terayama's text. Often funny, occasionally frightening, and beautifully staged throughout, DIVL! takes full advantage of its excellent cast. The spectacular athleticism and seemingly boundless creativity of these actors is a testament to Steele's sure touch as a director and also to the impact of Suzuki and Viewpoints training methods on contemporary actors around the world. Standout performances included Schenkkan's wide-eyed Lukas, Jessica Green's hilarious and poignant Lady Inflatable, Jill A. Samuel's hysterically Freudian One Eye, and Catherine Friesen as the victimized and vengeful Rachel.

Mariana Marquez's spare light and set design are integrated seamlessly with the uncredited sound design to shape the rough but wonderful temporary space at 15 Nassau Street. The onstage band also composed original music for the production, working from J.A. Ceasar's soundtrack to the original film. The result is fascinating mix of rock opera and experimental/electronic music that creates a haunting atmosphere.

The South Wing's press materials are full of self-aggrandizing pronouncements and unapologetic name-dropping that attempt to place Steele among a pantheon of experimental theater artists ranging from Terayama to Tadashi Suzuki to Robert Wilson. But DIVL! makes enough of a statement on its own to merit significant attention.

Of all its many successes, the production's greatest achievement is to draw attention to the fact that all theater is site-specific and ephemeral. This play isn't set in a small town or on a film set: it's set in the theater in which it is performed. As characters onstage grapple with the violent tension between memory and history, the window behind them looks out onto the man-made canyons of lower Manhattan's financial district, just a few feet away from a great scar on the city's collective memory.

More than any abstractions evoked by projections of Terayama's tanka poems above the stage or musings about the loss of cultural innocence embedded in the press release, this window onto the outside world makes explicit the connection between the histories of individuals and the history of the world in which they live.