Hoi Polloi's "All Hands"

Hoi Polloi’s latest piece, All Hands, is an allegorical description of societies in terms of religious cults. Now premiering at the Incubator Arts Project, All Hands, presents an intelligent critique of human interactions. But, like many smart plays, it gets too smart for its own good and lags in the middle due to an excess of examples.

Conceived and directed by Alec Duffy, and written by Robert Quillen Camp, All Hands uses a fictional, nameless religious cult to demonstrate the ways in which societies operate in terms of inclusion and, more dramatically, exclusion. The space was set up with tennis-court seating, with the audience on either side of the playing space. At the bottom of each steep wall of seats were a bench and four wooden chairs. Here the performers not in the immediate action sat during the opening scene. The effect was to incorporate the audience spatially with the performers, making us all part of the cult. This association disintegrated somewhat before reintegrating in the second sequence. A stranger comes to their door, soaked from the rain, needing a place to dry off. She doesn’t speak much English, and she obviously has nowhere to turn, because she submits to initiation into the cult in order to be allowed to stay. The audience found the initiation pretty funny – the antics of the cult were strange and silly to us. This continued until another character, part of the cult, entered and told the stranger that “This is fake. This is a play.”

So far we have theater described as a cult. Hoi Polloi went on to give examples of other social groups in the context of the cult’s rituals. They gave examples of inclusive groups and actions such as AA, corporations, and Occupy; and examples of exclusive social acts such as a member of the cult spouting violently extreme perversions of things that bore relation to the cult’s beliefs, labor organizing on advice from outside, and human sacrifice. I say that Duffy and Camp may have been too smart for their own good because, while all of these numerous examples are good and bear thinking about, after a while I’d figured out the allegory and was wondering where they were going with it. My attention started to slip until they managed to bring it all together in the end with a tongue-in-cheek explanation of the allegory.

Hoi Polloi’s All Hands plays at the Incubator Arts Project at 131 E. 10^th St. in Manhattan through March 31^st. Tickets are $18, and can be bought at the door or online at incubatorarts.org.

Liz Sager's Spring Awakening

The cream rises to the top, and Liz Sager’s production of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening in the Staller Center Cabaret is an excellent showcase for some of the best acting talent the Theatre Department at SBU has to offer. Caitlin Bartow and Eric Michael Klouda stole the show as Melchior and Moritz, respectively. Bartow was especially engaging with her adolescent boy bluster, and brought a good deal of depth to her character. From pretending to know more about sex than he did, to freaking out when Wendla (Molly Walsh Warren) had him beat her, to insisting on taking himself seriously in the graveyard, Bartow’s Melchior was the star of the play. Klouda (although he was a little hard to understand at first due to diction and delivering his lines at the floor) was the perfect opposite and scene partner to Bartow. Nervous and high-strung, he created a convincing character arch that culminated in a theatric tour de force in his suicide scene. They were perfectly cast as the two male points in the core Spring Awakening triangle. Unfortunately, I found the third point Wendla wanting. Warren seemed unable to deliver much beyond sighing innocence. She almost broke through into something incredible in the scene when she gets Moritz to beat her, and I was on the edge of my seat waiting for her to commit and meet Bartow’s energy, but she never did. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast was also split between those who owned the stage and those who seemed tentative, sometimes to the point where I thought they were grasping for their lines. I hate to say it, because it seems like Sager has been working hard on this for the past six weeks, but it read as under-rehearsed.

I would like to say a word about Sager’s directorial concept – this is her Spring Awakening and MFA project after all. From her program note, she is obviously interested in deconstructing the gender binary, and she approached this with gender-blind casting and costuming. The casting worked in part, and didn’t work in part. In a cast of twelve, she had nine women and three men. This meant that the preponderance of male parts was played by women, which audiences are used to in academic theater where we have more women than men. From the other direction, both Andrew Breslin and Chris Petty played women during the course of play. Breslin can be taken seriously as a concerned mother, and this is not the first time he’s been cast as such. It’s hard, though, to take the heavily bearded Petty seriously as a giddy school-girl. That choice seemed forced and heavy handed, as did Herr Gabor (again played by Petty) undressing Frau Gabor (Becky Goldberg) from her men’s clothing and re-dressing her as a woman when they decided to send the recalcitrant Melchior to reform school.

I left the theater feeling that a good idea was undermined by being under-resourced. With such a large dramatis personae, it seems that Sager was forced to cast actors who couldn’t meet Bartow and Klouda’s (among others) energy, and to cast a preponderance of women which I feel undermined the point of her gender-blind casting. And that's not even mentioning that a dozen actors is a lot of people to coordinate! Even half that would have been a handful. I left wishing that instead of attempting to do a translation of Wedekind’s entire play and super-impose a critique of the gender binary on it, Sager had instead adapted Spring Awakening to focus on those parts of Wedekind's story that best supported her critique.

Spring Awakening plays tonight (March 10^th) at 8PM and tomorrow (March 11^th) at 2PM in the Staller Center Cabaret. Last night was a full house, so reservations are recommended: http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/events/284882374915297/

And God Created Great Whales

“met’a·phor” (met’ə-fôr”) n. a figure of speech, based on some resemblance of a literal to an implied subject.” ~Webster’s Dictionary

“metaphor

1530s, from M.Fr. metaphore, from L. metaphora, from Gk. metaphora "a transfer," especially of the sense of one word to a different word, lit. "a carrying over," from metapherein "transfer, carry over," from meta- "over, across" (see meta-) + pherein "to carry, bear"” ~www.etymonline.com

Rinde Eckert’s And God Created Great Whales, now showing at the Culture Project through March 25^th, is the tale of an elderly piano tuner, Nathan (played by Eckert), who is rapidly losing his mind to dementia. The only thing (temporarily) keeping him from floating adrift is his opera “Moby Dick,” personified by his Muse Olivia (Nora Cole). The play is laden with imagery of the ocean: it symbolizes the mind, Nathan and Olivia tell Melville’s story over the course of the play, the set (original design by Kevin Adams) is held together by hemp ropes, the color coded tape recorders that hold Nathan’s memories hang around his neck like an albatross at the end when his mind finally goes and he is, in the words of the play, “adrift.” The ocean is a metaphor for the mind, just like the tape recorders are functional metaphors for Nathan’s memory.

The above quotations indicate that “metaphor” is specifically a linguistic device. Eckert’s Whales makes an element of speech or writing into living, four-dimensional process. The central metaphors are Moby Dick and the tape recorders. “Moby Dick”, in this play, has three referents, all of which blend together over the course of the eighty minute play: the story by Melville, the opera that Nathan’s writing, and Nathan’s journey. In telling the story, Nathan and Olivia take on the roles of Ishmael, Queequeg, Ahab and Starbuck. They are acting. They are representing someone they are not. In so doing, they explode the four-dimensional definition of “metaphor” to all role-playing. The opera becomes Nathan’s “white whale” (a metaphorical turn-of-phrase inspired by Melville’s novel): his quest to complete it before his mind is finally gone gives him the life-purpose to create the external memories in the tapes, and to create (in his mind) his infallible Muse Olivia to keep him focused on his project. But just as Moby Dick is Ahab’s elusive prey in the literal ocean, “Moby Dick” is always tantalizingly out of Nathan’s reach in the ocean of his mind.

Early in the play, Nathan goes of on a rant, or “marginal note,” trying to find a way to preserve his memory outside of his failing brain in such a way that it would preserve the essence of his self. He evokes the Egyptian hieroglyphics – they preserve the Pharaohs’ humanity while their bodies mummify beneath the desert. “Moby Dick” is his pyramid, his monument for those he leaves behind. He is creating the metaphor for himself. And yet he must create smaller, more personal monuments – the tapes that metaphorize what he did the day before. Because the hieroglyphs are not in fact the Pharaohs and Nathan is not his opera. They are simply objects that stand for the people. And the tapes are not actually what happened the day before, but they memorialize it – they preserve the highlights for future Nathan so that he won’t forget past Nathan.

Metaphors as a mnemonic devise – they flow throughout And God Created Great Whales with such persistency that they are the play, because, as far as most people are concerned today, the Pharaohs are what they left behind. And as far as Nathan of today is concerned, Nathan of the past is only what he’s left him on the tapes.

And God Created Great Whales is playing at The Culture Project on 45 Bleeker St, and runs through March 25. Tickets are $55, or $20 for student rush. http://cultureproject.org/

Wood Bones

William S. Yellow Robe, Jr.’s Wood Bones, as heard in a staged reading by the Eagle Project on March 7^th, is intriguingly problematic. It’s about the spirit of a dying house who is bound to her burnt-out husk by the memory of a little girl who was molested inside. While a clearly fascinating concept and one with a lot of potential, Yellow Robe’s attempt to fuse Western dramaturgy and Native storytelling structure makes the play seem unfocused and unfinished. I would go one step further and submit that it is, in fact, unfocused and unfinished.

The central conflict is between the house, 121, and her awful memory of the little girl’s trauma. Yet Yellow Robe adds two other memories in dramatic action, and several “I remember” monologues on the part of 121. The monologues bear little discussion – either because of an underwhelming reading on the part of Madeline Sayet, or because “I remember” monologues are inherently undramatic, they took the wind right out of the play’s sails. The two enacted memories – one of a couple who moved in only to be evicted for being Indian, and another of the construction workers who caused a gas explosion – contribute nothing to the central conflict. As Yellow Robe said at the talk-back, “I could have written a play about each of these things – and I have.” Normally, I would immediately recommend cutting these extraneous episodes, but Yellow Robe’s intentions give me pause. He’s trying to fuse Western and Native dramaturgies, an endeavor I have a lot of professional sympathy with. However, Wood Bones makes me question the viability of such a project.

The Native dramaturgy appears in this play as the non-chronological structure and juxtaposition of thematically linked stories. It is superimposed on a Euro-American structured play, complete with its fourth wall and script. This two elements mix just like oil and water. Classic Native storytellers like Lame Billy of Weitspus and Skaay of Haida Gwaii who employed Native elements like those in Wood Bones with aplomb told their stories to an audience already familiar with them face to face and without a script. The audience’s intense association with the stories allowed the storytellers to combine them in unique ways without loosing the audience’s attention. The lack of a fourth wall or scripts also helped to keep the audience engaged. Bringing the fourth wall and scripts into Native dramaturgy lessens that engagement, and bringing the Native dramaturgy into a Western play muddles the storyline, which in turn lessens audience engagement.

Wood Bones is a play with a lot of potential, but will never be able to reach that potential until Yellow Robe really treats it for what it is: a structurally Western drama about healing from trauma. He has everything he needs to tell this story already: a great feel for Western dramaturgy, a compelling story about a young girl’s horror, and the seeds for great chemistry between 121 and Leroy. But as long as he superimposes elements foreign to this story on Wood Bones, it will never reach that potential.

The Bloody Butcher of Wall St and the Bull

On February 27, Occupy had a National Day of Action – Occupy Our Food Supply – to protest growing corporate control of the world’s food. The action in New York City included a march, a seed exchange, street performance, and guerilla planting. I’d like to focus solely on the performance, which I’m calling “The Bloody Butcher of Wall Street and the Bull,” for the purposes of this blog.

Pure agit-prop, “The Bloody Butcher” relied on pure symbolism and didactic dialogue. The symbolism rested in the characters and the three places where the play was performed: Liberty Square, in front of the New York Stock Exchange, and in front of the bronze Wall Street Bull. The symbolism of the Butcher figure and the NYSE were clear – they represented the malevolent influence of Wall Street on us the 99%. Liberty Square is the symbolic home and birthplace of the Movement that counters this influence. The Bull, however, has taken on a new complexity of symbolism. It has been used by the Movement since before the beginning in its role as the symbol of Wall Street, but now it is also used to represent stock animals in reference to the way they are abused by agribusiness.  

You can watch the day's proceedings at http://www.lenk.tv/. This particular performance is saved in the Lenk-Atlantic channel at the end of "1-Occupy Our Food Supply" and the beginning of "2-Occupy Our Food Supply".