Whipped Cream - Oh Fuck!

As part of Portland’s Fertile Ground Festival this year, I got to see a double-billing of two new plays – Kate Horn’s Whipped Cream and Freudian Dreams and Sam Dinkowitz and Chris Beatty’s Oh Fuck! Oh Shit! It’s Love! The Musical at Hipbone Studio on Burnside. A grossly uneven pairing, it did illustrate two points my friend Amy Jensen made on her blog: double bills like this are really only done in festivals, and “invites the audience to be curious and interested what has been put together.” And really, Fertile Ground’s curators did a nice job pairing these two plays – they both entail explorations of relationships amongst the 20s and 30s crowd. Oh Fuck!  provided a poignantly funny journey through one couple’s relationship arch, beautifully executed by a strong cast. Whipped Cream, on the other hand, didn’t.

Whipped Cream and Freudian Dreams

Have you ever sat in a coffee shop and pretended to work on your novel about a well-dressed Northwesterner who solves vampire and werewolf related crimes with his Apple computer and six-pack of PBR, but really you were watching and judging the other café patrons and feeling secretly superior?

PBR - the hipster's spinach.

Kate Horn sure has (except for the novel plot – that’s my idea), and, like a modern day Sigmund Freud or Jane Goodall, she’s communicated her findings to us in dramatic form (using Freud and Goodall as characters, no less). The result reads like a thought popped into her head one day at the café and she promptly wrote a play about it, featuring an analysis by Freud of the way boys flirt with baristas. If that seems like a limited and contrived idea for a play, that’s because it is. It was cute for the first five minutes, but by then I was used to the gimmick and bored. Even when Horn tried to spice things up by bringing Goodall on stage to analyze the characters, it was all still the same schtick, just with a different vocabulary.

But it would be unfair to say that Whipped Cream only had one level, or that Horn can only do one thing. During the first nine minutes of the ten minute play, the psychoanalyst was the only one who broke the fourth wall, and he did it gently, always in the analytic third person, never addressing the audience directly. But Horn finished her play, quite jarringly, by having her baristas directly address the audience and telling us that we could take our chuckles and $12 tickets and shove them up our voyeuristic asses.

Oh Fuck! Oh Shit! It’s Love! The Musical

A product of Milepost 5 in the heart of Portland’s sordid Jade District, Oh Fuck! seems to think itself alarmingly randy. So I went expecting dildos and Vaseline, and instead got roses, doves and a charmingly poignant yet funny story of one couple’s journey in and out of love.

Sorry. None of these.

I got to see an earlier incarnation of Oh Fuck! at Milepost 5 this fall, which was only their key “falling in love” scene as part of a variety show of other work coming out of their artists’ commune. So it was fun for me to get to see a full-length development of the piece.

This incarnation was just a reading, so it was pretty rough around the edges. It also started slow. Dinkowitz seems to think he needs a prologue with the two main characters, Tim and Molly (Phillip J. Berns and Jessica Anselmo), writing in their diaries about how they feel about their upcoming first date. What Dinkowitz doesn’t realize is that this show absolutely rides on the chemistry between the performers. Tim and Molly’s relationship arch is adorable and rings true in a way that makes me joyful of the fun that I’ve had falling in love, and sad about the, well, sadness that I’ve had falling out of it. This magic isn’t limited to Berns and Anselmo’s chemistry together. The rest of the cast and pit are equally responsible for this show’s success. Juliana Wheeler and Orion Bradshaw are side-splitters as the main couple’s foils. Wheeler plays the sad sad ditzy cokehead Ashleigh, and Bradshaw is endearingly aggravating as the meathead Brad. Their interactions with each other, as well as with Berns and Anselmo, kept the audience hunched forward in laughter. But it wasn’t cheap laughs, like what I felt Horn was going for. Instead the humor came from the very real situations and the actors’ absolute investment in them, just as it should. The actors’ chemistry and the urgency of the story they found themselves in actually overflowed the stage, incorporating the musicians into their struggle to negotiate the rocky shores of love.

Happy Valentine's Day everybody!

Oh, it was a musical by the way. While most of Chris Beatty’s songs were still too rough to really tell anything about, I was impressed by the “Pre-Coitus Song” with its fusion of hip-hop and slow love ballad, and with the “Break-Up Song,” with its angsty minor tonality.

So, double bills. Just like Amy says, their still done but usually only in the festival setting. But what Amy doesn’t say is that an uneven bill like Whipped Cream and Freudian Dreams – Oh Fuck! Oh Shit! It’s Love! The Musical can either be remarkably unfair to the weaker piece (if Whipped Cream had gone second) or make up for a subpar and mean-spirited first piece with a truly inspired and moving second piece (like they did – good call Fertile Ground curators!) 

Fathom

Amy Jensen is a storyteller. By which I mean I see her doing exactly the same sort of thing with her ancestral Danish stories as I’m doing with my ancestral Karuk ones. At its most basic state, traditional storytelling is sitting around the fireplace or kitchen table telling tales of yore. But Jensen isn’t just a storyteller – she’s also a dramaturg. And an artist who is both of those things will bring a whole portfolio of theatrical tools to the old stories augmenting them, making them come alive.

Jensen’s work-in-progress Fathom is her telling of Hans Christian Andersen’s Wild Swans. Like any good teller of folk-tales, she uses the story not as a literal script, but as a guideline to which she can bring herself into the story, and the story into herself. And she does this quite literally. She weaves Wild Swans together with her own experiences with loss and depression, and with beautiful oral imagery of a museum exhibit filled with all kinds of weights and measures. Her storytelling also incorporates the choreography and dance of Heather Heiner and the composition and percussion of Levy Lorenzo. But the crux of Fathom is the juxtaposition of Wild Swans with Jensen’s deeply personal experiences. At times, this crux threatens to overwhelm the dance and music, and it’s not until Jensen steps back, or else incorporates herself into the choreography, that those other elements are able to come to the fore.

On the other hand, Fathom is yearning to become an immersive piece of performance. From the dance and music, to Jensen’s evocative oral descriptions of the setting, to her and Heiner’s bringing suds in their hands to incorporate the sense of smell, this piece is bursting at the seams, ready to explode into a quietly passionate experience. But for this to happen, it seems to me that the choreography, music, and set will have to flourish in the same way the storytelling already is.

Poor Lessing's Almanack

http://poorlessingsalmanack.wordpress.com/

Last night I went to see a play with my friend Amy Jensen, who got us in for free since she was reviewing it for this new blog. If only I'd known earlier that being a blogger gave me press status! I'm going to have to try to take full financial advantage of this thing in the future.

Anyway, this blog is still in the developmental stage. That means, it's still trying to grow a following, and perhaps decide what it's going to be. My blog is also in this stage, in that I check the Stats bar pretty regularly to see what people are responding to. "Poor Lessing's Almanack" has a key difference from "Kachakâach": while my blog is the musings of just me, "PLA" is a collaborative effort of several professional dramaturgs, many of whom seem to adhere to the traditional American definition of the job: they do research for plays and stuff. It also seems to be tending heavily towards reviews of plays that the contributors see. In that respect, it seems that "PLA" and "Kachakâach" are heading in similar directions. I look forward to seeing what comes of this new blog.

American Decameron

Practicing with the Kinect

On May 14^th, I participated as a storyteller and dramaturg in Phillip Baldwin’s American Decameron, held in The Tank on

W 45^th St.

The performance gave me an important insight into what the show really was, as well as confirming several ideas I’ve had floating around about collaborative storytelling.

Jose Ojeda ran music from his laptop at the foot of the stage

American Decameron was Phillip’s take on Boccaccio’s Decameron in which a group of young Florentines, men and women, flee the plague and tell each other stories in a remote villa. American Decameron only did minimal homage to Boccaccio’s poem. We crowd-sourced stories on themes that interest Phillip such as getting out of pink-collared jobs, sex, American society as a pyramid scheme, meeting attractive singles, and so on and so forth through a pair of blogs. He selected some of us to tell stories from the blogs while using a Kinect to VJ stock video and audio on a projection-wall behind us. During the course of the play, we stopped using the Kinect. As it turns out, it was only a distraction from out stories. I suppose it was similar to playing the piano while telling a story – your hands and body act separately from your mouth – but none of us had enough experience with the Kinect to play it while we told our stories. So about half-way through American Decameron became one person after another walking to the front of the stage and telling a story. That tells me that that is what it always was at its core, and the Kinect and the other toys that Phillip insisted on using were only fluff that got in the way of American Decameron being what it really was.

So American Decameron was about stories culled from our blogs, not about the Kinect. I’m not sure that crowd-sourcing through blogs is the best way to gather stories for a theatrical event. Blogs are a way to facilitate minimal communication. For example, I can talk to you through this blog when I choose. But I don’t know who I’m talking to, nor do I necessarily expect a response. I could very well be speaking into a vacuum. Because of my low expectations, you don’t have to respond. Were we speaking in person, I would know who my audience is, and I would expect and probably get a response. A real conversation could happen. These blogs are poor substitutes for conversation. They are helpful, in the case of this blog, when the potential interlocutors may be in the next state, the next time zone, or the next country. But in the case of American Decameron, all of the interlocutors shared a common geographic location at least once a week. The use of blogs and crowd-sourcing actually inhibited the creation of American Decameron.

Warming up with the Kinect and music

A better approach would have been that of classic devising, as I know it from Amy Jensen’s [here now then]. A small group of people meet in the evening and tell each other stories on the themes set out by the director. The director would then guide the ensemble through improvising on those stories to create a single show with a single spine. We would add in toys like the Kinect only if they actively contributed to the spine of the play. We would have known what we had before we were on stage. American Decameron has potential, but only if it ceases to be distracted by new technologies that only serve to cloud what it really is: a storytelling revue based on themes inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron.

Locker No. 417B

On May 12^th I saw my friend Amy Jensen’s new play, Locker No. 4173B, a New York Neo-Futurist production being held at The Monkey on West 26th Street, for which Amy worked as their dramaturg. It’s playing through May 21^st, and is a thoroughly enjoyable and thought provoking production.

An intersection of archaeology and theater, Locker is the result of Neo-Futurists Christopher Borg and Joey Rizzolo buying a foreclosed storage locker in an auction, and trying to reconstitute, from the stuff in their new property, the lives of those who had lost the locker. They brought their findings to the stage in the form of a docudrama.

Locker is fascinating on many levels: it’s a network of interesting stories, Borg, Rizzolo, and Yeauxlanda Kay performed beautifully, and the list only goes on. I would like to focus on just one aspect of this play: the way it humanizes archaeology, or, more specifically, archaeology’s subjects. The subjects of Borg and Rizzolo’s archaeological endeavor are, most likely, still alive. They may not be, however, and this crisis of ignorance of the current whereabouts of the subject is particularly meaningful from a Native perspective, from the perspective of an archaeological subject. Museums and archaeology, in their fixation on the past, often ignore the living members of their subject group. This oversight, at least in the experience of Native people, leads to the myth of the “vanished Indian” and the feeling I sometimes have that people think we all died at Wounded Knee.

If they are alive, and even if they’re dead, what are the moral implications of this invasion into their privacy? Borg and Rizzolo, and therefore the audience, wrestle with this question as well. At one point, Rizzolo says that a paranoid schizophrenic subject of their theatrical study may not be crazy after all: having her life pored over by a group of strangers in a higher social class is just the sort of thing a paranoid schizophrenic would fear. Later in the show, Rizzolo enters from the coat room with an audience member’s purse. He asks her how she would feel about him rifling through her stuff then and there and showing everybody her possessions. They finished the show by asking us to think about all our possessions – from treasures to junk – and which of those things we would want a stranger to study and judge us by.

Locker No. 4173B was simultaneously awkward and needed. I felt awkward going through strangers’ lives without their permission. But isn’t that the point? The dead and the living are never objects: they are people. Locker gracefully exposes a dehumanizing flaw in the archaeological method, a flaw that we living and marginalized subjects of archaeology, and its cousin anthropology, have been aware of for years. That the New York Neo-Futurists are telling this story to the hip, young and mostly white off-off-Broadway crowd is an exciting step in the right direction.