There is a Place in the Throat that Has No Voice 8:0:8

In his new science fiction/fantasy novel, There is a Place in the Throat that Has No Voice 8:0:8, Jacob Young creates a compelling world, but struggles with giving his characters depth. As such, 8:0:8 starts slow and is hard to get into, but once Young settles upon a protagonist, it becomes a real page turner. Following the Compass family through a series of apocalypses, 8:0:8 (and the “puppet” show that Young performed at his book reading at Backspace in Portland) shows a fascination with reaching the spiritual through science. In this way he blends sci-fi and fantasy: the book begins with a Kunstmärchen before becoming sci-fi with (SPOILER ALERT) gladiator robots that run amuck and destroy the world. From there the two genres blend in ways that give the story a fascinating unpredictability that makes up for Young’s thin grasp on character. The mystery of the new species born of science and destruction was enough to keep me plowing through till the end. However, Young doesn’t spend enough time with his first three protagonists to flesh them out and explore what makes them tick beyond telling us point-blank: “Jackal doesn’t like books” or “Nell is a nature writer.” When he does settle upon a protagonist, Young ignores his motivations and the reasons behind the decisions he makes in the interest of fleshing out the world of the story. The world works, but I would like Young to take as much an interest in his characters as he does in his exploration of how spirituality can manifest in our world through science and destruction.

The Big Oh!

Who knew choral music could be sexy? I sure didn’t, and I’m not entirely sure that the Resonance Ensemble, who explores sexuality in classical choral music with their current program The Big Oh!, are convinced that it can be.

They began the evening with an arrangement juxtaposing choral music with 20^th century pop songs, and their third number was Yngve Gamlin’s The Paper Bag Cantata was a heavy handed demonstration of finger-banging and premature ejaculation. By not embracing classical music’s strength in subtlety, the Ensemble belied a sense of inadequacy in their ability to communicate sexuality. While this tendency towards the literal and demonstrative pervaded the program, moments of passion and sensuality did manage to rise to the surface.

A good part of the first half of the evening was devoted to nineteenth century climactic musical structure and how it mimics the male sexual experience. At first it was exciting, but when I realized that’s all there was to it – the music swelled in intensity only to fall off into release, I didn’t need to hear any more. Not that the music itself wasn’t beautiful, but calling my attention to one specific element limited my experience.

After intermission, the program was better for me. Natalie Gunn and Maria Karlin’s duet from Léo Delibes Lakmé felt like sitting in a jasmine scented garden enjoying a lover’s body – never mind that’s what the words said, that’s what the music felt like. Artistic Director Katherine FitzGibbon could stand to learn from this. Sexy doesn’t come from saying “this is sexy” or “these two notes grind together” or from singers making cutesy faces of what they thing sexy looks like. No, sexy is a feeling, and it’s a feeling that works on everyone differently. And that, again may be a weakness of the program. Since a major strength of classical music is its subtlety and its power of suggestion, and everyone finds different things to be sexy, all this program could aspire to be is a selection of music that FitzGibbon finds sexy. Not to say that I couldn’t feel a sense of elation surrounded by the rich harmonies of Edwin London’s Bach Again or appreciate the passionate abandon of Orff’s Carmina Burana, but those were only moments that worked. Unfortunately, the evening as a whole doesn’t.

But if you’re feeling experimental, The Big Oh! is playing again tonight at The Alberta Rose Theatre at 7:00.

The Eternally Present Past

For two nights (last night and tonight) Melanya Helene and Marc Otto are performing their therapeutic play The Eternally Present Past at The Brooklyn Bay on SE Franklin.

This has to be the best play I've seen since I returned to Portland this winter. Most of the plays I've seen, while fun, are ultimately forgettable. They may scratch the surface of profundity, but shy away from something that plumbs the core of the audience’s being in favor of pop culture homage. Helene and Otto are performance-psychologists who use performance to help people heal in the way they relate to others. Eternally Present Past is one step away from a workshop where the participants explore their own explicit and implicit memories. They began evening by inviting us to access a memory of feeling connected and to take note of how that memory effected our bodies. This helped me to reflect on myself and my own memories and state of being throughout the performance, trying to find parallels between myself and the stories they demonstrated on stage with language, music and movement. In fact, my only criticism is that they didn't go far enough in including the audience in their performance. 

People's Republic of Portland

Last night I watched a comedian from a major American metropolis tell amusing anecdotes about our Cascadian paradise. Was I sucking back PBR with my Umpqua ice-cream in a dimly-lit room going on a Portlandia marathon? Of course not! Everyone who’s anyone knows to pair an Old Rasputin with dairy desserts. And I wasn’t watching Portlandia anyways. I put on my second favorite black tie and headed downtown to Lauren Weedman’s People’s Republic of Portland at Portland Center Stage. And no, it wasn’t just a theatrical staging of Fred and Carrie’s TV hit. Those New Yorkers go for sketch comedy, but L.A. Lauren’s show is stand-up/storytelling. And that gal can spin a yarn! She regaled us with her misadventures visiting Portland for the first time. A seasoned solo performer, she kept the audience entranced with her vivid depictions Portland types that we all know and love, or at least know and tolerate. Whereas Fred and Carrie have the luxury of costumes and actual locations, Lauren didn’t need any of those. For the most part, in fact, whenever she tried to stray away from telling the story with just her voice and body and tried to bring in lights and music, the choice felt forced. It disrupted the flow of her narrative and didn’t contribute anything. But the standing ovation she got at the end excuses any misguided theatricality. All told, People’s Republic panders to Portandian egos in the same way as the TV show: we love it when representatives from our big city sisters New York and L.A. come here and tell us how quirky and awesome we are.

Beer McMennamin’s Ruby Ale. It’s a fun Portland beer, and People’s Republic is a fun Portland play.

Tomorrow

Yesterday I went to Tomorrow. But I didn’t drive a DeLorean. No, my Ford Taurus and I went to Action/Adventure’s new play, where we were informed before the show started that we would be seeing Tomorrow today. I might go back and see it later, maybe next week, but I don’t think it will be finished (bet you thought I was going to make the “tomorrow” pun again, didn’t you? No, I know when to stop.) It wasn’t yesterday, that’s for sure. 

Action/Adventure structured their play like the Zager & Evans standard “In the Year 2525” by creating a trope where they would cite a pop culture reference from each decade, 60s through 90s, envisioning the future, and then explore other stories about what the future might be like. However, the drama in Zager & Evans’ story comes from humanity’s increasing depravity in each century. Tomorrow lacks such a build. However, they do touch upon and develop the theme of cultural pessimism about the future. At least, I think they did, but this could just be a narrative that I'm imposing: Tomorrow lacks a clear focus and instead draws together a potpourri of stories, dance and song without anything more precise than “the future” to hold it all together. But this is what I think they were driving at:

Our visions of the future are based in our visions of the past and present. They need to be: the future is unknown, so all we have to go on is what is already familiar. Action/Adventure develops this by citing (past) cultural edifices looking at the future: Zager & Evans, Mad Max, Terminator, Ray Bradbury. But these stories all describe a future where humans have lost control and the only law is violence. When you put two and two together, this shows us that, at least since the 60s, our vision of our past and present is also one in which humanity has no control over its own fate and in the absence of that control are reverting to our default position of rampant violence. The word “apocalypse,” originally the “revelation” to St. John about God’s coming kingdomon earth, now indicates hell on earth. Even positive futures are seen with little hope: “utopia” literally isn’t any place. In fact, the most compelling moment in Tomorrow was when the ensemble juxtaposed “the sun will come out tomorrow” with global warming.

But, just like Action/Adventure started in a good direction with the Zager & Evans structure but didn’t follow through, they hampered the impact of our culture pessimism by preaching (like in church) optimism. While I could have forgiven the structural corruption brought on by a light focus on that pessimism, the force optimism took me out of it. Because of that, I just didn’t buy the story they were telling. The promise without delivery makes this play feel unfinished.

And what beer goes best with Tomorrow?

Well, this one’s a little harder. The easy answer would be Lagunita’s Pale Ale, since that’s what they were selling and that’s what I drank. But what self-respecting dramaturg takes the easy route and shirks research? Not this one, that’s for sure. So, just like Action/Adventure goes back in time for their source material and finds hardly anything but devastation and hopelessness yet inexplicably tries to end on a high note, I’m going go back to vintage beer advertisements and recommend that you grab a couple buds and head on down to 1050 SE Clinton next weekend. Tomorrow is problematic but not without promise. Where there's life, there's hope Bud.

http://vintage-ads.dreamwidth.org/tag/budweiser

The Possessions of La Boîte

This weekend The Reformers open their flagship piece, The Possessions of La Boîte at Zoomtopia on SE Belmont. The only thing I knew about the piece when I parked down the street on a rainy Friday night is what I’d read on The Reformers’ website:

“The Possessions of la boîte is an ensemble devised work taken from actual family letters and group improvisation.”

If that description makes you think of something that would be performed off-off-Broadway by the New York Neo-Futurists or at the Incubator Arts Project then you are in the same boat I was. And you would be just as wrong. Possessions is less a play than it is an orchestral piece, where actors replace the violins, Richard E. Moore’s soundscapes stand the cellos, and the timpani is the click click click of a typewriter.

Conceived by Charmian Creagle and then created by an ensemble of defunkt Theatre alum, Possessions uses Creagle’s old family letters to create a theatrical poem. Everything is subsumed by the mellow, sleepy rhythm of cycling repetitions of tropes from the source material. This rhythm is augmented by the Moore’s tonal moodscape and the gray costumes designed by Kimberly Smay. These legato elements are punctuated by an staccato that threatens to intrude into the meditative qualities of the piece, only to once again be repressed by their twilight grays. They begin small: a sneeze, the snap of a sheet, the rattle of a typewriter. By the end, they have grown into Kubrickian projections by Ben Purdy and Carrie Solomon: rapid-fire montages of found video accompanied by a piercing industrial music. But even these more dramatic intrusions lack the potency to speed or permanently alter the driving legato.

These rhythmic tension provide a kind of drama, but not the kind I was expecting. Possessions works well as a piece of classical music, and I feel that if I’d gone expecting Dvorak instead of Neo-Futurism, I would have gotten a lot more out of the experience.

The Possessions of La Boîte plays Fridays through Sundays at 810 SE Belmont at 8PM. The price is $15.

And, just for fun, let’s try pairing plays with beer:

Black Butte Porter is the perfect beer for Possessions. The rich dark flavor interrupted but not overwhelmed by the prominent hops matches The Reformers’ legatos and staccatos.

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!)