Discover AtlantASS

Interarts collaboration is all the rage these days, as well it should be. Our modern version of Richard Wagner’s Gesammtkunstwerk, cooperation between artists of different disciplines seems like it’s a driving force for contemporary theater. But the operative word here is “collaboration.” Painters, musicians, actors, etc. coming together to lend their expertise to a project that requires their expertise.

Talibam! and Sam Kulik’s Discover AtlantASS, now playing at Incubator Arts, requires expertise in both music and storytelling. This trio, consisting of solo artist Sam Kulik and the Talibam! duo Matt Motel and Kevin Shea, can handle the first of those two things, but they are woefully inadequate storytellers. The theatrical parts of their performance were badly under-rehearsed jokes about everything from child-abuse to the sexual assault of a 5th grader with smatterings of misogyny and racism that seemed to have been written while the trio were stoned and mad about the BP oil spill. Yeah, it didn’t make a ton of sense to anyone else either. At first we in the audience laughed – they weren’t taking themselves too seriously, so why should we? Then I started to sit through the scenes waiting for the songs, which were pretty decent. But after intermission it just dragged on and on – their shtick had gotten old, and their songs were all starting to sound the same.

If I could offer one piece of advice to Talibam! and Kulik, it would to be to stick to rock & roll. Theater isn’t for you guys. If I could offer a piece of advice to the Incubator Arts curators, it would be to watch the plays you pick before you pick them. And if I can offer one piece of advice to you, dear New York audiences, it would be to not go see Discover AtlantASS.  

Sophie Gets the Horns

Riot Group’s new play Sophie Gets the Horns was almost, in the words of Winston Churchill, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” But, unlike a swelling super-power breathing huskily down the neck of a continent breaking out in war, Sophie Gets the Horns lacks any necessarily compelling quality, unless it’s the force of the acting. But good actors, committed to the play, can make even the most earth-bound story take wings. They were the only ones standing between the audience and the piece’s infectious solipsism.

They were mesmerizing – and the story (a play about Sylvia Plath within a coming-of-age tale set at a small liberal arts college in the 90s) did take me on a trip down memory lane. I graduated from Lewis & Clark College in 2008, but, in Portland, it might as well have been the 90s. But as it progressed away from the gentle marijuana use and sexual experimentation into the feverish Plath-esque world of Alice’s (Mary Tuomanen) mind, it became more foreign, more alien, more like Reed College.

While the stellar acting and initially reminiscent setting let me ignore the play’s faults at first, I left Incubator Arts Project wondering what Riot Group was trying to get at. Was it supposed to be about Sylvia Plath? If that was the case they could have stuck with the play-within-a-play and dispensed with the intricate framing devise. Was it a celebration of being a privileged white girl in the 90s? And is that really play-worthy?

Obviously it is, at least in playwright Adriano Shaplin’s (who also played Bernardo and did sound) mind. But a theme drivingly interesting to the artists but not necessarily to the audience smacks of solipsism. It wasn’t just limited to Alice’s poetic brain-child “Sylvia Plath Fucks the Minotaur”, but extended to the incomprehensible lines and circles drawn on the floor to Professor Shallembarger (Drew Friedman) going to “Sylvia Plath Fucks the Minotaur” without any apparent motivation for doing so.

But I could be wrong about all this. It seemed like Sophie Gets the Horns really mattered to the Riot Group, and the trip down memory lane to the liberal arts college experience I was fortunate enough to have was nice for me. When I imply that nobody is particularly interested in the stories of privileged white women who came of age in the 90s, I omit one important group: privileged white women who came of age in the 90s. It seems that the Riot Group and Incubator Arts’ main audience are hipsters, probably the best audience for this sort of play. If it is to succeed, it will be with them.

Sophie Gets the Horns is playing at Incubator Arts Project until May 20^th. Tickets are available at the door or online at http://incubatorarts.org/riotgroup2012.html.

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.