Staller [Off] Center

Last night was the inaugural Staller [Off] Center – a joint endeavor by the Staller Center and Stony Brook’s Theatre Department to bring new work to Stony Brook. While the double-bill of Jake Hooker and lumberob was a miss and a hit in terms of performance, Staller [Off] Center as a whole successfully brought one-man shows that you’d expect to find Downtown or in Brooklyn to the beautiful North Shore of Long Island.

Jake Hooker

Hooker’s show, thisisitisthisit (Shit Shit Shit): A Map of the Known World or thatwasitwasthatit (Shit Shat Shot): A Rememberance, was indeed a rememberance of another show that looked to be visually and theoretically rich and compelling. I would have loved to have seen it. Instead, I saw its shadow. Derivative of the original, thisisitisthisit left me feeling cheated that I all I got was a telling of what seemed to be a very good show.

lumberob

Rob Erickson (lumberob)’s method of playwrighting/storytelling fascinates me, and so for my little review for his piece Rocky Point, I’m going to try something like it. When I got home last night, I wrote a bit about Staller [Off] Center in my journal. Today I’m going to do an audio recording of me critiquing Rocky Point. You’ll never get to hear it. I will though – I’m going to listen to it and let it prompt me in saying it again to the video camera. You will have access to this recording: I’m going to put it on my YouTube channel and link it to this post. Then I’m going to write a review to post below that video off of what I say in it. It probably won’t be word-for-word, though, because I’m not going to pause the video while I write. Here we go…

So while I wasn’t as big a fan of Jake’s piece, I was of lumberob’s. So I’m doing a review like he did his piece. He’s manically impressive. He’s just sweating and sweating halfway through the performance. He records his stories, then listens to them while he does the performance. He swiftly and sweatily leapt between beatboxing and storytelling. He tells stories like this in comedy clubs, but he started to loose me in the middle. He did a mashup of disparate elements from different texts and he started to loose me. It can really work and keep you on your toes but you have to be able to follow the narratives. They can leap between manically but it can’t be a mash-up between “I Am a Woman” and a sailor story. Each unit has to be complete in itself. If you do that you can get away with what he does. And he does in the beginning and end. It was manically impressive, but he started to lose me in the middle.

Workshop with lumberob

“I really like broken things.” ~lumberob

This afternoon, Rob Erickson (aka lumberob) gave a workshop of sorts in the Staller Center Cabaret about his unique storytelling aesthetic in preparation for his show this evening at Staller [Off] Center. More than a workshop, he monologued about his varied influence and how he likes to create tension by challenging himself and the audience. He eschews the well-made play as “predictable” and “tedious” and opts instead for a style that switches between genres, creates confusion in terms of who’s in charge of the show, and uses exhaustion as an element, among other things.

What all that means, I’m not sure.

I got the most from watching and listening to how he told his stories. You know how sometimes you tell a story to a friend, and it’s unrehearsed so you’re thinking about it as you tell it? Sometimes you repeat yourself, sometimes you backtrack, sometimes you may even contradict yourself. lumberob tells his story like that, except it’s clear that it’s deliberate. To add an extra layer of tension, he listens to himself tell the story on his smartphone while he tells it. It’ll be interesting to see him go for a longer set tonight.

Of particular interest to me is the way he writes. He, like me, works between audio recording and text. But, for him, the audio is the (semi) final script. For me, at this point in my artistic development, it can be either/or depending on the show.