Love's Labours Lost

I spent last Sunday night swathed in the fragrance of blooming roses, lost in the pageantry of love’s sweet delight. And that was only before 11:00, while I was watching OSF’s production of Love’s Labours Lost!

Shakespeare wrote a linguistic feast, and the Festival has given us a surfeit of visual beauty as well. I’ve always found Shakespeare’s poetry in this play like walking through a rose garden, and it’s as if I found my psychological twin in scenic designer Christopher Acebo! He filled the space with roses: they grew out of the stage, they drifted from the sky. Thanks to costumer Christal Weatherly, they even emanated from the characters! OSF’s Love’s Labours Lost is a pageant of poetry, both aural and visual!

“Pageant,” incidentally, is one of those words that bring out the dramaturg in me. If I were a Soviet sleeper spy, it would be the word that activates my mission to overthrow capitalist empires or something. So let’s talk a little about pageants.

There are places that Love’s Labours Lost is a sleeper, and not of the Cold War espionage variety. Those places are where Shakespeare uses stage techniques that resonated with his audience, but are foreign for us. The masque and allegorical presentation of the Nine Worthies were entirely familiar to 16^th Century Brits. They were used to miracle and mystery plays that presented Bible characters and allegories of different vices and virtues. And they were generally fun! Imagine a life with no TV, no internet, hardly any books. You spend your day breaking your back in a field, or making gloves in a poorly-lit room surrounded by the smell of other people’s shit. Your entertainment is Christian mass and miracle and mystery plays. Your attention span is longer since you don’t have Youtube, and you want to spend as much time watching spectacles as possible anyway before you get back to your miserable life where you only bathe once a year.

It’s kind of fun to imagine, but it’s not our culture. The pageantry we’re used to is J-Pop and The Nutcracker. So while the audience my have been thinking about whether or not they remembered to call the dog sitter during the girls’ little joke on the boys, and what kind of ice-cream they ought to buy after the show during the Nine Worthies, they were there and enjoying it when Dumaine (John Tufts) started singing and dancing his love letter, and they were practically clapping along when the boys came out dressed as Muscovites to Tschaikovsky’s familiar strains.

Is Love’s Labours Lost a labour to behold, hopelessly dated and fit only for the most self-despising culture vulture? No! It’s a beautiful play, as beautiful as an evening walk in a blooming rose-garden. It certainly has potential to become dramatic drivel on stage, but in the hands of OSF’s expert artists, Shakespeare’s poetry lives and breaths and engages our 2011 audience as much as a four-hundred year old play can.

Imaginary Invalid

Moon boots! ‘Fros! Bell-bottoms! Molière!

OSF premieres a new adaptation of the classic Imaginary Invalid that really got my groove and flipped my funk. Director Tracy Young was searching for a concept to slap onto the Molière’s play – something integrating “the populist aspects of commedia and the over-the-top gilding of the French Baroque.” She says she “landed” on French pop music from the sixties, but what she really did (she and her co-adaptor Oded Gross) was fly.

The set was clean – it set us in upper class Paris – but it did not prepare us for what happened at 8:30.

At 8:30 the ensemble came out dressed in some of the most fabulously flamboyant costumes I’ve seen at OSF (so a nod to costumer Christopher Acebo is in order). They sang and danced a lively little ditty by Oded, Tracy and Paul James Prendergast that got my feet tapping and me ready to see the show!

Now let’s get sober – this choice was a risk. Whenever a director decides that she needs to have a new setting for every classic play that comes her way, she’s in peril of making something slap-shod and boring. You can have all the eye- and ear-candy in the world and still have a bummer of a show. This Invalid is not stuck in that hospital bed. It wasn’t about taking two things that suggest each other to the director and putting them on stage together – it was hardly intellectual at all (and that’s a good thing – some of the worst plays I’ve seen were still stuck in somebody’s brain). It’s fun. The creative team had fun, the designers had fun, the performers had fun, and so we the audience had a grand old time.

August: Jackson County

Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County is going viral all over the country, but should it? I wondered if I would get more out of it if I saw it again, in the same way you would expect to get more out of a Shakespeare play when you see it the second and fifteenth times. After all, people seem to be treating August as a new classic.

I can’t see why.

I could complain about the acting. After all, the Old Globe had a stirring class, but OSF’s ensemble fell short of what I’ve come to expect from that company. I am, naturally, thinking of the two productions that I’ve seen a week apart together. The OSF cast was doing everything that actors should: projecting, keeping their cues tight. But it didn’t seem organic. I failed to invest in the characters, and I failed to laugh at their outrageousness. What happened was that they ended up playing it at the same level and tempo throughout the first act, and it was fairly clear to me that they were acting. I should qualify this review right now by saying that I only made it through the first act. I figured if I was going to be bored until midnight, I could at least do it in my bed, asleep.

I could be alone in this. It seems I am: everybody I talk to enthuses about August, and the audience I was a part of was pretty lively. This makes me think that the acting didn’t read as stagey to the rest of the audience as it did to me. They genuinely seemed to be into it. So why wasn’t I? Could it be that I just heard these jokes a week ago, and so they seemed old? And if that’s the case, then it tells me that August is superficial: there’s nothing under the surface.

Others disagree with that opinion. Director Christopher Liam Moore indicates in his program note that he’s fascinated by the focus on family. He posits that “there is a little bit of the Westons in each of our families.” But if this were the case, then I should be able to invest a little bit more. As it turns out, I just have no reason to care about a dysfunctional white family living in Oklahoma, especially one that parades its exaggerated extremities in front of me for three and a half hours.

August: Osage County

Jerry Springer, meet Tracy Letts. You two should have a lot to talk about – you both have a penchant for dysfunctional white families.

But seriously, the Old Globe performance of August: Osage County was an absolute delight as far as production goes. Kimberly Guerrero gave my spine a shudder the way she stared (spoiler alert!) at Angela Reed after Angela’s character Barbara struck her child. And Lois Markle owned the role of Violet and the Old Globe! That woman has a pair of pipes that can fill up the theater and suck all the energy to her. That’s what Violet does: she sucks all the energy out of everybody in the house and makes them as miserable as she is.

And Sam Gold’s direction took me on a journey! They played for laughs in the first two acts, and laugh I did. Not even Jerry or Maury can get the same kinds of hearty guffaws and mischievous chuckles out of an audience. The third act was an about-face. It all of a sudden got pretty serious. Unfortunately, it was too long. I was with them up through the point that (spoiler alert!) Bill leaves with Jean. That seemed like the ending, and I was surprised when they kept going. I didn’t get back into it again until Violet told Ivy (played by Carla Harting; also, this is another spoiler) that she was banging her brother. If it hadn’t been for the middle of the third act, the entire event would have been an incredible journey. As it was, it was an incredible journey with a disappointing hint of self-indulgence on the part of the playwright.

Now that we’re talking about Tracy Letts again, we’d better address some fundamental issues with his script. His treatment of the Other and Indians seems lazy, which makes his script feel like a Jerry Springer-type attack on a created family, and nothing more. The play is about a dysfunctional white Oklahoma family, but he inserts into their world an Indian. Johnna Monevata seems well-balanced, but is she? The last scene of the Old Globe production made me question why she stays in such a hell. She read like a vulture. But is she? Is that in the script, or just the production? What Tracy does is he introduces two Others for his predominately white audience: the dysfunctional white family, and the Indian. Racially, his audience should feel alienated from Johnna, but psychologically from the Westons. Or should they? Tracy gives himself a lot to work with by picking an Indian as the interloper into the Westons’ world, but he then he gets lazy. Why doesn’t he deal with the Cheyenne’s troubled history in Oklahoma, something that should be on the forefront of all the characters’ minds? More importantly, why doesn’t he delve deeper into the question of the Other, represented in this play by a brutally self-destructive family and by an Indian interloper? By allowing Johnna to be a greater player in this world, rather than the dark-skinned maid servant of traditional colonial theater, he could make this play more than Jerry Springer style sadism. He could make it a play about the role of the Other in modern Indian-white relations, as well as about the Other within ourselves. His play could mean something.

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.

Guerilla (Coyote) Theater: Actor's Meeting

I met with my actors for what I’m calling “Guerilla (Coyote) Theater.” The plan is to tell the traditional Karuk story “How Birds Got Their Feathers” in a guerilla theater/agit-prop format. Depending on how it goes, I would like to use this format as a way to protest for our Native people in California. Goodness knows we have enough to fight for, and if this would help us to simultaneously halt assaults against our lands and traditions, and at the same time educate our own people and outsiders about who we are, then it is a form worth pursuing.

We made some important progress. I brought up my concern that, unless we connected this directly with our audience, it would only read as the theater students being pretentious. So I posed the question, “What is it that has Stony Brook students worked up?” The answer is Andrew Cuomo’s budget cuts. He’s cutting funding from the lower-income people who need it most, and allowing higher taxes for rich people like him to expire. We cast the play with Chris Petty as Coyote, Becky Goldberg as Wren, and Nancee Moes as Kachakâach. We also set a date: May 17th.

Next, I need to draw up a script (which I would like to be more of a commedia-style outline than an actual script), figure out where we are going to do it, and set up a Facebook group to start advertising for it. I’m working with an artist here, Jose Ojeda, to create masks for my actors, and I need to find some kind of a projector to throw Cuomo’s image up on the wall.