Our Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe Weekend

At some point during our Labor Day weekend in Philadelphia, Catherine and I tried to remember when we first came to the Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe. As best we can remember, it was in 2000 when the performance that blew us away was Mark Lord’s promenade performance through the Old City, Across. For me, that piece is indicative of all of our best experiences with this festival: it was epic, imaginative and remarkably daring. I haven’t loved everything I’ve ever seen here but I’ve never been completely disappointed, either, especially with the curated Live Arts events. And almost every festival has at least one production that particularly has inspired and invigorated me, artistically.

This year, all nine of the shows we saw are remarkably strong and several of them are absolutely fantastic. Four in particular are among the best work I’ve seen this year: Method Gun, Twelfth Night, Elephant Room and WHaLE OPTICS. All four productions feature outstanding performances and are imaginatively directed and designed. They are all challenging works: physically demanding of the actors and intellectually stimulating for the audience. With the exception of the Pig Iron show, they all employed modern technology to some degree but their most effective elements are actually fairly low- or old-tech: an overhead projector, the fly system of a theater, traditional sleight of hand, repurposing fabric to create the continent of Antarctica (complete with the Transantarctic mountain range). These productions that remind you of what live performance offers that television and film can't: the incredible energy and emotional impact of being present in the moment with artists at work. Of these, no piece embodies it better than the Rude Mechs' Method Gun (pictured, right): what might easily have been a simple satire about a theatrical guru transforms in the end into an astonishing illustration of the power of actors onstage and the potential danger into which they continually put themselves.

Other highlights this year:

• Mary Tuomanen and Genevieve Perrier, who give delightful (and vocally strong) performances in A Paper Garden. It's a charming, cleverly-constructed little production in a lovely garden. I especially admired their cross-gender casting choice—it's a tricky thing to make work and Ms. Tuomanen and director Aaron Cromie succeeded very well.
• James Sugg in Twelfth Night (pictured, left). Fantastic: I don't need to see anyone else play Sir Toby Belch for a long time. As far as I'm concerned, we can put this play on a shelf and leave it there a while.
• Rosie Langabeer's music for Twelfth Night: it creates the  perfect mood for Pig Iron's show. Plus, since she and her musicians perform it all live and take on several roles, they are a big part of the metatheatrical success of the production.
• David Disbrown and Christina Zani in Headlong Dance Theater's Red Rovers. It's a clever piece but uneven structurally: it works because both performers are engaging and do a great job with the occasionally unusual choreography.
• The pumping station space where Zon-Mai (pictured, right) is presented. The installation, videos and choreography in the piece are all excellent but it was hard to walk into that space and not imagine how it will look once it becomes the new festival headquarters.
• Brian Osborne's channeling of Carl Sagan in WHaLE OPTICS. Not an impersonation, really: just the distilling of the essence of him into his own character. Most memorable.

• Trey Lyford's carefully-crafted performance in Elephant Room. The whole piece is over the top from the beginning but it also has several exceptional moments where the three magicians demonstrate their skills as actors (and all three are very skilled). We're a little prejudiced, of course, but Catherine and I thought Trey's revelatory speech was absolutely beautiful.

By going the first weekend, there are shows that weren't playing yet that we would have liked to see. In particular, Improbable Theatre's The Devil and Mister Punch, New Paradise Laboratory's Extremely Public Displays of Privacy (although we have been seeing the preliminary parts of it on their website) and John Jasperse's Canyon (we have the option to see it at BAM, fortunately) and Play by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Shantala Shivalingappa. But that's always the problem with having only one weekend for this festival—you kind of have to be a resident of Philadelphia to really get everything it has to offer.

Photos (top to bottom): Kathi Kacinski (Method Gun), Jason Frank Rothenberg (Twelfth Night), Awatef Chengal (Zon-Mai).

Philadelphia Live Arts Festival: Day 2

I'm looking forward to writing about the shows we saw last night but there's no time: we have four to see today. I'll just say for now that they were both every bit as excellent as I expected.

Saturday, September 3: 

A Paper Garden: Aaron Cromie, Mary Tuomanen, and Genevieve Perrier, 1pm. It appears to be a site-specific performance in a garden. And it's only 33 minutes long. We're there.

Zon-Mai: A performed installation, 2pm. This is an enormous multimedia installation by choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkauoi and filmmaker Gilles Delmas in which they have recorded dancers from around the world performing in their own homes. It’s being presented in a former pumping station near the new Race Street Pier park (which is also the space that will be the future home of the Live Arts Festival).

Red Rovers: Headlong Dance Theater and Chris Doyle, 4pm. Another artistic hybrid of dance and installation, this one was inspired by the Mars rovers, silent films and vintage Donkey Kong. Wouldn’t miss it for this or any other world!

Max Frisch’s The Arsonist (The Firebugs): The Idopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, 7:30pm. If I’m reading this right, it’s a play performed as a silent movie based on a 1958 animated film. It might be brilliant, it might just be a good idea… Only one way to find out….

And then: we have 35 minutes to cover 14 blocks. We should be able to walk it… assuming that the 7:30 show starts on time and is 80 minutes long, as it is advertised. Otherwise, we’re taking a cab…

The Speed of Surprise: The Groundswell Players, 9:30pm. The main attraction of this play for us is that it is directed by Charlotte Ford—an artist whose work we’ve long been interested in seeing but always seem to miss (the problem with having to do the entire festival in one weekend—not everything we want to see is playing). The description of this piece begins, "Four intergalactic assassins zoom through the void." If the rest of the evening lives up to that sentence, I think we'll have a good time.

Philadelphia Live Arts: Days 2 and 3

By the time we got back to our room Saturday night, It was too late and the end of too long a day to post so this will be a longer than usual post. That, or my reviews of the shows will be shorter: I haven’t decided yet…

Day 2
We actually began our day, at the strenuous suggestion of our friend Wayne-O, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see the exhibit on the construction of Marcel Duchamp’s final work, Étant Donnés.* Catherine and I had been to the museum about 10 years ago and had seen the installation then; while I still remembered it pretty vividly, I didn’t know any of the story behind the piece. The exhibit, which includes many of the materials and documents that Duchamp used to create the work over about 20 years, as well as the manual he left behind after his death with instructions for how to reassemble the installation, give an incredible insight into the creative process of an amazing artist. Unfortunately, we had less than an hour in all at the museum—time to see the exhibit but not enough to cast more than a glance at some of the great artworks in their collection as we sped past.

Our first performance on Saturday, Urban Scuba, is a fantastic dance piece performed in an abandoned swimming pool at the Gershman Y. The risers for the audience seating have been built in the shallow end of the (mostly empty) pool so that the performance can take place in the deep part. Brian Sanders’s choreography is muscular and athletic, employs quite a bit of wire and bungee work, and has a vocabulary that I found to be whimsical in some movements and extremely visceral in others. He’s accompanied here by three very skilled and very brave dancers: not only do they leap over and into the abyss many times but they dive with seeming abandon into waters that can best be described as murky. Each new dance in the piece offers the audience a fresh discovery in the architecture of the space and another exploration of the relationship of human beings to water—at one point even taking us back to our exit from the primordial ooze. It’s an exceptional work and one of the highlights of this year’s festival.

SCRAP Performance Group’s TIDE, by contrast, has problems. It’s a shame, too, because the opening moment, in which the sea goddess-mother nurses and then murders her human offspring is stunning; after that, those moments of divine inspiration appear only haphazardly and fleetingly. It’s not that the creators, Myra Bazell and Madison Cario, suffer from a lack of ideas but that they had far too many: the themes are unfocused, the text is generic and the movement vocabulary feels like well-considered phrases that never manage to connect to a larger whole. The performers all move well but they’re not strong actors and are often difficult to hear. The large expanse of the Ice Box just seems to swallow the piece and the design choice of making the stage as absolutely white as possible—to the point of creating white boxes to cover the floor-mounted lighting instruments—only emphasizes how little of the space is used. Artistically, the stronger moments in the piece point to great potential; a little more clarity in the artists' thinking might have yielded some impressive results.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from daDAda: it’s an artistic movement that we’ve researched pretty thoroughly and I was curious to see how other artists would interpret it for a modern audience. For Anthology Project, it’s a joyous and slightly silly movement that seeks to spread the gospel of randomness and absurdity; it’s certainly not the confrontational, anti-art movement of many of its original practitioners. That’s not to say that I think what Thomas Choinacky and Chrissie Harms are doing isn’t dada—dada was truly different in every city, at various times and for every group of artists; why couldn’t the 21st century Philly version be a child-like game? I might wish the duo had spent a little more time planning some of the elements and that there’d been a little more literary heft to their texts… but, gosh, they’re both so cute and they did a great job of getting the audience involved! This is a mere trifle but it’s a fun 40 minutes of play time: not a bad way to spend the gap between weightier fare.

What happened in New Paradise Laboratories’ FATEBOOK: Avoiding Catastrophe One Party at a Time? Were we solving a mystery? Were we participating in a commentary on life in the age of “social networking?” Were we players in some sort of interactive game? What’s great about this performed installation is that the answer to what happened is probably different for every single person in the room, in spite of the numerous repetitions of the brief stories in the piece. Anyway, if you spend too much time trying to “figure it all out,” you’ll miss out on the experience, which is quite engaging and smart. The planning of all the many videos is exceptional and the use of dozens of screens to sculpt the environment into a maze of rooms is well-executed—there were quite a few times when I could glean several bits of information in a couple of different story lines by standing in one place. I haven’t spent any time on their show website yet (although I’ve received many entreaties to do so on Facebook over the past few weeks), but I understand it enhances the experience in some way… not that I think it’s really necessary: I personally liked the one I had Saturday night just fine.

Day 3
Before this weekend, I could probably have counted on one hand—perhaps even on one finger—the number of times a show has ended and I’ve thought to myself, “It’s over? I’m not ready for it to be over yet!” I can add another finger now because that’s exactly how I felt during the curtain call for STORE: Kate Watson-Wallace absolutely followed the showbiz adage to always leave 'em wanting more. Installed in an abandoned pharmacy, it’s so simple a production as to be almost old fashioned from a design standpoint, with video shown on a dozen or so television monitors, a stage in the center of the room strewn with old clothes and lighting done almost entirely with cliplights (there were four ceiling-mounted video projectors, too, but they were used pretty sparingly). As a commentary on our societal addiction to consumption and how we measure the worth of things, it’s unsubtle; fortunately, Watson-Wallace's strong choreography and the joyful and energetic performances by the very talented dancers more than compensate. I especially enjoyed a sort of duet in which a young woman delighted as another dancer dressed her in layer after layer of clothing until she resembled the hapless Randy in the movie, A Christmas Story. STORE is, hands down, my favorite of the pieces we saw in the festival.

There's not much that I can say about Mike Daisey's How Theater Failed America that hasn't been said already, and much better, by reviewers and bloggers around the country. I expected it to be thought- and discussion-provoking, and it was; Catherine and I were still talking about it on the train home last night. I expected it to be funny and it was very much so. What I didn't expect was for it to be so literate: Daisey doesn't just tell a good story, he writes a good story that still feels conversational; in listening to him, I was impressed by how clearly-stated his talking points are laid out, and yet the monologue never feels like someone is reading me an essay. I thought it might be more confrontational—the title would certainly suggest more of a diatribe than a reasoned observation, but it's definitely the latter (I'd never considered the notion that, according to the process we all follow as theater artists, you can fully realize any play ever written in just three and a half weeks of rehearsal!). But the biggest thing I took away from the performance is how inspirational it is to spend time with someone who truly loves the theater, as Daisey makes very clear: it's only that person or thing that we respect the most that can disappoint us this dramatically.

Our last event of the weekend was Steve Cuiffo's Digital Effects at the Painted Bride. It was presented as part of Lucidity Suitcase International's Off the Grid festival which is powered entirely be renewable energy: the electricity for the (rather dim) lighting came from solar panels on the roof and Cuiffo powered the sound with a foot pump generator. The real digital effects in the piece were performed by Cuiffo's fingers: a series of amazing card tricks that he warned us at the very beginning of the evening would all be familiar to us. True, but it's alway impressive and entertaining to see them executed by a master—even when you sort of know how it's being done, you can't but help wonder, "How'd he do that?"

*The complete title is actually Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas).

Last Week in Theater

Last week was filled with performances for Catherine and me to attend—so many, in fact, that we weren't able to see them all. I was particularly disappointed that we had to miss The Centrifuge's Fresh Ground Pepper on Parade Friday night: unfortunately, it was raining that evening and we already had tickets for another show at 9:30—if I'd just been going home afterward, the idea of a 3-hour traveling adventure through the East Village, even in the cold and damp, might have been fun.

On Thursday night, we were on the Upper West Side for Zakiyyah Alexander's 10 Things to Do Before I Die at Second Stage's McGinn/Cazale Theater. The play shifts back and forth between the lives of two sisters: Vida, the older one, is a high school English teacher who has a knack for getting into relationships with men who can't or won't commit to her; Nina, a novelist struggling with her second book, is in the enviable position of having the perfect boyfriend who would like nothing more than to get married and take care of her. After years of not speaking to one another—Nina included personal observations about her sister's sexual relationships in her first novel—they are forced together again when they receive ten boxes of their late father's personal effects and must comb through their "inheritance". While there are no surprises in the piece—I felt pretty certain well before the act break that all of the plot points would have a satisfying resolution—it's a clever, funny and very sweet script: it might easily have fallen into a Lifetime movie-of-the-week formula but didn't. I can see this play doing incredibly well in regional theater—smart writing, an engaging story and really plum acting roles for two women and three men. This production is nicely staged by Jackson Gay although many of the transitions between scenes took a little too much time and made the evening feel longer than it actually was. All of the actors, without exception, give strong performances but especially Natalie Venetia Belcon and Tracie Thoms as Vida and Nina and Francois Battiste as Nina's boyfriend, Jason.

Catherine and I had seen a previous incarnation last year of The Bang Group's ShowDown at Joe's Pub but we try to never miss their performances here in NYC; as ususal, they didn't disappoint. Choreographer David Parker has an incredible gift for infusing his modern and ballet vocabulary with popular musical theater styles—usually tap dance—into which he subtly hints at relationships between his dancers' characters. Most often, this is manifested by one dancer attempting to reach out or connect to another only to meet resistance—but never outright rejection—from the partner. The drama in Parker's dance comes from the tension within a relationship and how the characters modify, ignore or employ the tension in order to gain control over a situation. In ShowDown, Parker has choreographed to the film score from Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun—a show tailor-made for his humorous explorations of power struggles within relationships. I'd actually love to see the piece in another venue at some point: the stage at Joe's Pub is relatively small and while the dancers do a remarkable job of fitting the choreography to the venue, I can imagine that a little more distance would augment the tension better. The company—Nic Petry, Amber Sloan and my very good friend and personal hero, Jeffrey Kazin—are incredibly gifted performers and make what is clearly very difficult and strenuous choreography appear effortless; they're a joy to watch. Bookending the show on Friday were short comic duets by Deborah Lohse and Monica Bill Barnes (to the accompaniment of recordings from one of Johnny Cash's prison concerts) as a pair of vaudevillian deputies in long red underwear and leather vests (our friend Nomi referred to them as "the rodeo clowns," which I thought was an apt description).

Saturday night took us out to The Chocolate Factory for an evening of lab works from director David Herskovitz and his Target Margin Theater, The Theater of Tomorrow. All of the productions in the lab were non-naturalistic plays written during the first half of the 20th century. David adapted and directed Gertrude Stein's A Family of Perhaps Three for three women—Chinasa Ogbuagu, Allison Schubert and Indika Senanayake. In the original work, a third-person narrator tells us about a family of at least a mother and two daughters—the narrator is either unsure of the details or is having trouble remembering them. It's a piece about the connection of family and how those relationships change over time. Of course, it's Stein's use of language, not plot, that drives the piece—how she modifies a phrase, then contradicts the modification, then splices both phrases together to give the text an entirely new meaning. By dividing the text between the three women, Herskovitz has introduced different voices, spatial relationships and vocal inflection into Stein's poetry; I wouldn't say it makes the text any clearer but it definitely provides the audience with a point of entry and a context for her words. In what may have been one of the most arresting images I've seen onstage this year, the show begins with Ogbuagu sitting silently, looking out at all of us in the audience; after a very long moment, she opens her mouth ever so slightly as if she is going to speak... and then quickly shuts it and sits looking out at us again for another long moment: a brilliant opening that established the self-correction and textual contradictions that will follow. The actors all do a great job; I especially enjoyed the contribution of "Sound Demon" Caroline Kaplan, who sits upstage center running sound cues from a computer and contributing vocally from time to time during the piece: she has a pinpoint focus on the other characters whenever possible that complemented the linguistic gymnastics very well.

Later that same evening, we returned to the Chocolate Factory for two more short pieces: E. E. Cummings' Tom, adapted for puppet theater by Kathleen Kennedy Tobin; and Edna St. Vincent Millay's Aria da Capo, adapted by Asta Bennie Hostetter and Julia Jarcho. The Cummings piece is from a ballet based on Uncle Tom's Cabin; I enjoyed Tobin's puppet work—which runs the gamut from naturalistic representations of characters to dramatic abstractions—but the text itself really didn't engage me. For the Millay, the adaptation is extremely silly—often a bit too silly, I thought—but it is visually engaging and the three performers (Hostetter, Jarcho and Julia Sirna-First) have a lot of enthusiasm and energy that held my attention throughout the piece.

Finally, on Sunday, we saw Naomi Wallace's Things of Dry Hours at New York Theatre Workshop. It's a very smart and beautifully written play about a Depression-era African-American Sunday School teacher and Communist organizer, Tice Hogan, in Alabama. He and his daughter, Cali, must take a mysterious young Caucasian man, Corbin Teel, into their home; neither Tice nor Cali completely trust Corbin Teel (they invariably call him by his full name, making the words seem like an accusation or a curse), but he threatens to turn them into the authorities for Tice's organizing if they don't allow him to stay. Wallace's very poetic, but still naturalistic, dialogue prolongs some scenes a bit too much—especially when Tice must explain The Communist Manifesto to the uneducated Corbin Teel—but, for the most part, her use of heightened language is able to ramp up the tension, as well. The play is exceptionally well-served by the actors Delroy Lindo and Roslyn Ruff: they are both powerful performers and are able to make Wallace's words seem competely natural. Garret Dillahunt, as Corbin Teel, manages to walk the thin line between presenting himself as someone honestly in need of Tice and Cali's help and a sly villain awaiting his opportunity to strike at them. The play is at its most alive in the scenes between Dillahunt and Ruff in which the sexual tension between their characters is counterbalanced by Cali's deep distrust of this intruder into the safe haven she has created for herself. Ruben Santiago-Hudson's direction of the actors serves the script well; I'm not a big fan of blackouts between every scene—especially in this production, it slows the pace too much—but I know I'm in the minority on that point: almost every performance I see these days leaves me sitting in the dark more than I would like. Still, it's a good production of an outstanding play with three very talented actors: head on down to East 4th Street and check it out.

Making Magic in Bars

I've had an idea for a while to create a performance piece based on plays/stories/novels that take place in bars or drinking/drunken speeches or scenes in which drinking plays a large role (which describes just about any play by Noël Coward, really). I'm going to develop a script for a site-specific work for me to direct that can be performed in bars (here in NYC, I'm especially interested in Jimmy's No. 43, of course, or The Bourgeois Pig, pictured at right). I'm asking everyone I know to send me titles/authors of works that fit this bill. Here's what I have so far:

Arthur: Ten Nights in a Barroom (the book, not the play)
O'Neill: The Iceman Cometh
Masteroff, Kander and Ebb: Cabaret (although I'd like to stay away from musicals at this point but I guess I could look at Isherwood's Berlin Stories or Van Druten's I am a Camera)
Chase: Harvey
Patrick: Kennedy's Children
Williams: In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel
Albee: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Saroyan: The Time of Your Life
Shakespeare: I Henry IV (haven't figured out how this one might work but Act II, Sc. 4)
Shakespeare: Macbeth (the Porter's speech after the murder of Duncan)
Miller: The Days of Wine and Roses

Of course, the beauty of the piece is that it could be performed in any bar, anywhere in the world—The White Elephant in Fort Worth, the Elk's lodge in Joplin or Au Lapin Agile in Paris (guess which of these tops my list...). I'm not sure yet how the piece will work: obviously, much of this material is copyrighted so I won't be using it outright. But I thought I'd start with how other writers have approached drinking and bars and see where it leads me. So all you amateur dramaturgs out there, drop me a line with your suggestions, tout de suite!

This Week in Theater

Catherine and I decided to jam a lot of theater-going into this week: by Friday, we'll have seen six performances in six days... and we're not seeing anything tonight. So far, we've seen four performances since Sunday; on Friday we're seeing Target Margin at 8pm and our friend Robby's band, p o c c k e tt k n i ff e, in Brooklyn at 11pm. Part of the reason for this flurry of activity is that some of the shows are closing and if we don't go this week, we're not going to see them. The only drawback is that I'm going to have to spend tonight chained to my computer so that I can finish the next draft of my Gilgamesh script to meet the deadline for the reading on February 7 (so why am I taking the time to blog today? I'm at my day job—interruptions are fine for blogging, not so much for playwrighting).

Sunday, we saw Gina Gionfriddo's Becky Shaw at Second Stage. It's a quirky piece—sort of a comedy, sort of not—that makes no attempt to offer pat answers for the questions it poses; I liked it a lot. The two central characters, Max and Suzanna—beautifully played by David Wilson Barnes (who was fantastic in Lady earlier this year) and Emily Bergl—are emotionally stunted thirty-somethings who have literally grown up together (as a child, Max was brought to live with Suzanna's family after his mother died) and have never really addressed the sexual attraction they have for each another. In Act I, Suzanna and her slacker/novelist husband, Andrew, attempt to set Max up on a blind date with an attractive but emotionally damaged woman from Andrew's office, Becky Shaw; Act II offers us the aftermath of this disastrous event. Much of the humor in the piece comes from the barbs, insults and asides that Max, Suzanna and her MS-stricken mother, Susan (a very strong Kelly Bishop) constantly hurl; Gionfriddo clearly has a gift for wickedly acerbic one-liners. However, Becky Shaw is a complex and meticulously constructed work: each of the characters has an opportunity to reveal to the audience greater emotional depth and heartache that they hide from one another; these moments collectively give the play greater dimension and richness as the story progresses. Director Peter Dubois has created a tight, efficient production that serves Gionfriddo's writing extremely well; it's by far the best show I've seen at Second Stage this year.

Monday night brought us to the Hudson Guild Theater and William M. Hoffman and Anthony Holland's Cornbury: the Queen's Governor. For those of you who might not know, Peculiar Works presented a reading of the play last winter as a benefit and we have worked with Hoffman and the play's director, Tim Cusack, in both of our OFF Stage events in 2006-7. Hoffman and Holland were inspired to write the play, based upon the legends behind a painting at the New-York Historical Society, during the U.S. Bicentennial to provide a queer perspective that they found lacking in all of the celebrations. Although the play has had readings over the last 33 years, it had not been produced until now. David Greenspan, in the title role, is extremely funny and (as he always is) a joy to watch; his Cornbury—a cross-dressing fop who's always on the make—may be something of a cartoonish cliché, but Greenspan does a good job of keeping it fresh. Tim has emphasized the "play-within-a-play" convention of the piece, having the actors work the ropes to bring in the very 18th century-looking drops and placing the barely representational set pieces on stage; it's the right choice for Hoffman and Holland's play and serves the production well. The performances are a mixed bag: the stand outs for me are Everett Quinton, particularly funny as Parson Van Dam; Ken Kliban as Cornbury's Jewish administrator who spends much of the play teaching a Native American warrior (Eugene the Poogene) a mixture of English, Hebrew and Yiddish; and, though I'm certainly prejudiced toward my friend, Nomi Tichman is especially strong as Queen Anne performing a prison scene duet with Greenspan. It's a breezy evening at the theater, though perhaps a little slow at times; coming as it did at the end of a very difficult tech week and opening weekend, I imagine it will find its pace again easily.

We were back at HERE on Tuesday for Jennifer Gibbs and Kristin Marting's Sounding, adapted from Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea. This Culturemart production was very much a work-in-progress: it will eventually be a seven-character piece but the artists took this opportunity to focus on the relationships of the three primary characters. I really liked the fragmented quality this choice gave to the evening: the audience had to collect the story elements in bits and pieces as the performance progressed, which heightened the mystery of the piece. The central character, Leda, is a former rock star who has escaped to Cape Cod with her psychiatrist husband to mourn the loss of their child. We see snapshots of her former life in a series of concert performances and in her interactions with projected videos of The Stranger—a handsome young man who is mysteriously pursuing her. I'm intrigued by Kristin's work here—even as a partial sketch, it's a compelling piece—and surprised by the departures she's made from her previous projects: she's been developing a gestural vocabulary for several years that gives her productions a dance-like grace and richness. In Sounding, this vocabulary emerged chiefly in the concert flashbacks; as a result, these scenes stand out as being especially strong and engaging. The video work is gorgeous and Leda's interaction with The Stranger projections heightened the disconnect between the two characters; I'm anxious to see how adding the live actor into the mix will affect that relationship (of course, he may not ultimately appear live onstage... and I'll be interested to see how that works, too). Kristin will be continuing to develop the piece in HARP and the full production is scheduled for 2010; I'll definitely be going back to watch their progress over the next year.

Last night was spent at Corio for the Big Apple Burlesque in Last Call At The Starliner Lounge. While it's a very silly piece—I mean, get real: who wants to see a Beckettian burlesque?... hey, wait a minute: I think I would like to see that!—the group here has done a good job of bringing more than just the usual double entendres and cheap sex jokes to the festivities, including a few references I caught to The Third Man and other noir classics. (don't worry, though: there are plenty of double entendres and cheap sex jokes). This burlesque noir follows female private dick, Softy Malone (Honey Birdette), investigating the murder of performer, Sally O'Malley (Ruby Valentine); the case leads Softy to a variety of gender-bended stock characters: crooked cops (Clams Casino and Broadway Brassy); her fawning, one-eyed male secretary (Scott Rayow); her hard-boiled partner (Weirdee Girl); and The Voice (Snuffy Patterson), her inner monologue (we arrived a couple of minutes late so I don't know if they explained why The Voice was male). The live jazz combo that accompanies the performance, play songs ranging from early 20th century to more contemporary (my favorites: Rayow's "Behind One Eye" twist on the Pete Towsend song and Snuffy's rendition of Jolson's "Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody" followed by Neil Diamond's "September Morn"). Of course, this is burlesque, so the action is occasionally interrupted by strip teases (though not as often as I expected); these are all well-performed and a lot of fun (kudos especially to Clams' act accompanied by the band's freaky interpretation of "Happiness is a Warm Gun"). Starliner Lounge is a delightful low art romp and one of the more original evenings of burlesque I've seen in a while.

Photo of Cornbury: The Queen's Governor, Gustavo Monroy

This Weekend on Stage

Last night, Catherine and I saw Sibyl Kempson's Potatoes of August at Dixon Place. The piece was described in the DP brochure as "a theatricalist fugue" and I would agree that it is more akin to a musical performance than a play... and I don't mean that in a nasty way. Kempson is one of a group of young artists whose work has been influenced by director Richard Maxwell and Elevator Repair Service. They pare down their theater to only the most essential elements, to the point that the actors represent characters rather than inhabit them and their emotions are removed or extremely flattened: these performances are pretty much a complete rejection of Stanislavskian naturalism. This stripping away of the conventional artifices of theater can be very effective—it provides an automatic irony, which can be very funny, and focuses our attention on what the characters are saying rather than how it is being said.

The central component of Potatoes is two elderly couples who discover sentient potatoes in the woods near their homes: this is the basic through line for the evening. The piece had a number of incredibly strong moments—visually and textually—but it never really coalesced for me. Some of that may be that it was a hard for me to understand the potatoes—performed live by actors offstage on a microphone instead of being pre-recorded, which I applaud—when they were speaking and singing, so I never really got what it was they wanted; I had no problem with the notion of thinking tubers, I just wanted to know what they were thinking. It wasn't a frustrating experience—I was engaged and interested throughout the performance—but missing so key an element kept it from being a satisfying one. Ironically, I'd be interested in seeing Potatoes again, which I don't say very often about any production; I think I might get more from it with a second viewing.

In a similar vein, style-wise, was the performance we saw today of Tim Etchells' Sight is the Sense that Dying People Tend to Lose First, performed by Jim Fletcher in the Under the Radar festival. Catherine and I first saw Etchells' company, Forced Entertainment, in London when we were on our honeymoon in 1993 and have been fans of the group ever since. In this piece, Fletcher, alone onstage, delivers an hour-long series of short statements—some are facts, some are opinions, some are just ludicrous claims—in a very simple, matter-of-fact fashion. He provides very little variety in his facial expressions or vocal patterns, which forces the listener to evaluate each statement he makes: what do I think about what he's just said? Sometimes I agreed with him; sometimes I thought "yes, but not exactly;" sometimes I thought it was just nonsense. But it ultimately required me to consider almost every single line of the piece: that's not something I have to do very often in the theater and it made for an interesting experience. On the surface, Fletcher appears to be playing "himself," or at least a character very much like himself, but I actually think there's more nuance to his performance than that: the barely perceptible arc to his stream-of-consciousness demands that the actor create an internal logic for these seemingly random thoughts; without that sort of character choice, memorizing the piece is impossible. My only complaint about Sight is that the actor occasionally fell into a rhythm that lulled me almost to the point of falling asleep a few times; I wouldn't be surprised, though, if that wasn't a little bit intentional by Etchells and Fletcher.

Rock of Ages

When I sat down to read my Playbill at New World Stages last night and realized that someone, Chris D'Arienzo, had actually written a book for Rock of Ages, my first feeling was dread: I feared that we were about to see the hair band version of Mama Mia. I needn't have worried, though: apart from a few pairs of Spandex pants and the prodigious use of hairspray, the two shows are as theatrically distant as the music they celebrate. No one here has taken anything that happens onstage seriously—except the performance of '80s musical mash-ups, which are all lovingly and flawlessly performed. Anything less than that and I could see this being a really long evening...

The action takes place some time in the late '80s on L.A.'s Sunset Strip. Our tour guide through this little slice of pop history is the mulleted former-musician-turned-sound-engineer, Lonny (a very funny and quick-witted Mitchell Jarvis), whose narration provides the audience with the constant wink that this show requires: he reminds us again and again that we're in an Off Broadway theater watching a performance. I won't go into the plot—it's a musical theaterish show, so there's a love story, of course—because that's not why anyone is going to see this show. If you're here, you wanna rock! And rock they do: the band is killer, the sound system is just shy of ear-shatteringly loud and everyone in the cast has a high note. I'm sure it's the stuff of nightmares for vocal coaches, but if you're gonna sing Steve Perry, you better sound like Steve Perry.

The acting—sure, acting: why not?—is really cutting up, cartoon-style; to my mind, this is just as difficult to do well as the Stanislavskian stuff, and more painful to watch when it's done badly. The performers all do a fine job with their stock characters and predictable dialogue. Stand outs include Will Swenson (whom Catherine assures me was "sex onstage" in Hair at the Delacourt this summer) as the David Lee Roth/Axl Rose rock star and Lauren Molina as the geeky activist trying to save the Strip from developers (it's the '80s: greed is still good!). Because they're the love interests, Constantine Maroulis and Kelli Barrett are as much eye candy as anything but they both sing great and have a couple of truly funny moments.

If you don't like any of the songs on this list, then Rock of Ages may not be for you. If your idea of heaven is to slide that well-worn Escape LP out of its sleeve and drop it on the turntable, then you may be one of the legion of middle-aged "small town girls" and "city boys" in evidence all around us last night who hope this "movie never ends/It goes on and on and on and on..."

Ritual vs. Routine

Stories about pets are like stories about illness: of supreme importance to the storyteller, mildly interesting to those who love that person, and pretty much a complete bore for everyone else. This may be a bit of an overstatement, but only a bit. So if you don't love me, you may want to skip this post.

I won't go into great detail here other than to say that our 18-year-old cat, Jojo, is having a bad year. We'd been treating his suspected brain tumor (the only way to prove it was to have a CT scan—wildly expensive and dangerous for an older cat) with steroids, which only treat the symptoms—it won't make the tumor go away but he's able to live somewhat normally. Then yesterday, he had a series of short, violent seizures; the doctors are monitoring him now to see if they can treat this with medication... and we'll know more later today or tomorrow, it appears.

Of course, I wanted to report this bit of news which is of supreme importance to me and Catherine. But it was a relatively small aspect to this story that prompted this post and it's title. Catherine and I are not morning people; Jojo is. He's always been enthusiastic about meals, especially breakfast, and once the sun is up, he's a pest until one of us gets up to feed him—almost always me. This morning, I woke up before the alarm went off and I suppose the absence of that other alarm had me wide awake. So I got up and began doing the things I normally do each day... always aware that I was doing them differently: there's no black cat in the dark to avoid; I made coffee but didn't need to do anything with cat food; there's no cat litter on the floor to be swept up.

Routines are, to me, ways of doing mindless tasks: they allow us to do necessary but relatively unimportant things without thinking about doing them. They're things we do only for ourselves, really. I rarely vary the tasks or the order in which I do them because breaking the routine means forgetting something; and if I do break it, for the most part, it affects no one except me.

Rituals, by comparison, are communication. We establish them not only to help us remember (although that is part of it), but as a means of communicating or communing with something or someone. In religious ceremonies, we're not merely worshiping a higher power, we're seeking a dialogue, which is why prayer figures so prominently in them. What I do in the morning is more ritual in that it's a dialogue with the cat: he wants to be fed right away but I know that if I don't make the coffee first, my moving around in the kitchen will disrupt his eating (he's afraid of being stepped on and he's got good reason to be—our NYC kitchen is tiny). We do the same thing every day—not mindlessly, but always in response to each other.

When I was taking directing classes in college, whoever was teaching would usually bring up the idea of incorporating ritual into theater. It's possible I wasn't paying very close attention (in fact, it's pretty likely) or perhaps they didn't do a very good job of explaining it (also pretty likely), but I always thought they meant researching Eastern traditions and religions and incorporating those rituals into my theater. I've seen plenty of excellent productions that have done that—Julie Taymor's stage work and Mabou Mines' An Epidog immediately spring to mind—but I've never been inspired to work that way.

This morning, the absence of a dialogue just sent my mind racing. I'm not sure what it means, really; most likely, it's just a kind of recognition that I probably should have had 20 years ago if I'd been a better student. But it's definitely got me thinking about the projects I'm working on differently, especially the master class Ralph, Catherine and I are teaching this fall. I guess more than anything, I feel like I'm putting together a new (for me) idea of ritual and the role it may play in my art.