Leave it to the New York Neo-Futurists to be clever! Their copiously-titled current production stages the stage-directions, and only the stage directions, of some of O’Neill’s classic plays. A reader sat dressed in black in the corner and read the stage directions out loud while six performers, dressed in matching gray henleys and black suspenders acted them out. Every cue for motion came directly and unquestioned from the reader, who didn’t hesitate to repeat herself if the performers didn’t perform.
TC&CSDOEOV1FPLP is a full length performance of one of the Neos’ Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (TMLMTBGB) sketches, and, as you might imagine, hilarity ensued. The concept lends itself to wordless physical comedy, and the Neos delivered. While extending any of the TMLMTBGB sketches into a production risks becoming gimmicky, TC&CSDOEOV1FPLP narrowly avoided that trap. To be sure, there’s only so many things you can do to keep acting out one playwright’s stage directions fresh, but the Neos have the stage savvy and the balls to do it. Just when I felt they’d run out of new jokes, they came out of left field with something I hadn’t expected.
On a theoretical note, TC&CSDOEOV1FPLP demonstrates something that I’ve read about as a hallmark of the old avant-garde, and have noticing as an underlying trend in some of the off-off-Broadway plays I’ve seen here in NYC. There’s an interest in deconstructing a classic work of art into its constituent parts, and then staging the part that the primary artist(s) find most intriguing. The practice itself is intriguing to me, and now I’m as curious to stage somebody’s stage directions as I am to stage a film spatially.
No comments:
Post a Comment