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!) 

Texan Progress

Greater than its sub-myths like Columbus and the Revolution, the Myth of Progress is the foundational American state of mind. Predicated on a clear division between Civilization and Savagery, the Myth of Progress tells the story of Civilization’s unstoppable progression into and conquest of the untamed wilderness. In the American version, Civilization is synonymous with “Democracy,” “Christianity,” and “America” itself. Native peoples fare poorly in this American myth, cast as the savages that must be overcome for America to fulfill her divine mission as the world’s shining light upon the hill.

Few American communities have as much invested in this myth as rural white Texas. Proud preservers of cowboy culture, the culture that “tamed the West,” Texas has historically celebrated Indian killers like those played by John Wayne. So it’s refreshing to see sensitive treatment of Native themes in the recent incarnation of the Texas Panhandle Heritage Foundation’s perennial melodrama Texas.

A celebration of the Panhandle’s colonization by white America, Texas could easily go down the same road as my least favorite movie, The Searchers. But instead of the Comanches being treated as murderers of white men and rapists of white women who need to be annihilated for civilization to progress across the continent, this new version of the 45 year old melodrama has added in celebrations of the Panhandle’s Comanche people. From introducing the first and only pan-Comanche Chief Quanah Parker as a peripheral character, to the inclusion of a Comanche hymn during a faux healing ceremony (enough to give whites an impression of what’s going on but not enough to be totally weird for Indians), David Yirak’s current adaptation of Paul Green’s script is commendable.

Of course, there’s still work to be done, especially with the character of Quanah Parker. First, it would be better if he was played by an Indian. Goodness knows there’s enough Indian actors out there hungry for work, and casting a non-Native is dangerously close to Henry Brandon’s Comanche travesty in The Searchers. Second, at one point Quanah Parker says, point blank, that the time of the Indian is over.

Still, it’s not as bad as it could have been, and, for Texas, it looks like representations of Indian people are heading in a positive direction. It plays through August in Palo Duro Canyon State Park, and tickets are available at http://www.texas-show.com/. It's worth going just to see how they utilize the space, which merits a review all of its own.

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.  

3C

Rattlestick Playwrights Theater’s production of David Adjimi’s dark comedy 3C is disco-dancing proof that a strong cast can make even the weakest script soar.

The cast (including CSI: NY’s Eddie Cahill as Terry) was uniformly top-notch, but Hannah Cabell and Jake Silbermann stole the show, as Linda and Brad respectively. They played the script’s two most traumatized characters, and their skillful performances ironically emphasized the script’s weaknesses while selling the show well enough that I had to get on my phone right afterwards to recommend it to a friend.

Adjimi starts to tell multiple stories in 3C – Linda’s sexual assault, Brad adjusting to civilian life after Vietnam while confronting his homosexuality, Mrs. Wicker’s (Kate Buddeke) mental illness. But the only story that gets told with any depth is that of Brad’s homosexuality, and this struggle lacks definition until more than halfway through the play. Initially, it seems like the traumas that Adjimi will address are of sexual assault and returning from war, or even coping with mental illness like bipolar disorder. But the first two get lost in the preoccupation with Brad trying to come out of the closet, and the third is played for laughs.

That said, this cast sold it. Cabell and Silbermann told as strong a story in their pensive silences as they did (tellingly) with Adjimi’s dialogue. Anna Chlumsky and Cahill thoroughly entertained strutting their 70s stuff around the stage. Bill Buell terrified while tickling the audience’s funny-bone as the homophobic Mr. Wicker, and Buddeke pulled of what could have been a slap in the face to those who suffer from mental illness with aplomb.

Rattlestick’s production of 3C is worth every penny of the somewhat steep ticket price, but I don’t think Adjimi's script is something that I would want to pick up myself or recommend to somebody else’s theater.

It runs through July 15^th, and tickets are available at http://www.theatermania.com/off-off-broadway/shows/3c_184026/.

Storytelling Workshop at the Piggyback Fringe Festival

Yesterday, Chris and I did a workshop on telling family stories theatrically. We were in Wakefield/La Peche's brand new community center, and had a pretty substantial space. It was a smaller class with only four participants, but that meant we were able to give each group individual attention. But before we split them into groups, we did a warm-up for the whole class. It was one that Chris knows called "Wa", and it was fairly challenging with just six people (four students plus two teachers), but it did the job we needed it to do: got everybody into their bodies and playing around. Then we split them into pairs, and Chris and I each stuck with a pair to help them develop their skit. We called one partner "A" and the other partner "1" to get rid of any semblance of hierarchy - this was also a workshop in devising, after all. First A told a story from their family to 1, who told it back from the first person point of view. Then they switched. They selected one of the stories to develop into a skit to perform in front of the class. We got two very different, very good skits. I had the impression that it was a very empowering experience for the students: if they can accomplish that in an hour, just imagine what they can accomplish after three months of development and rehearsal!

"The Baskets" World Premiere

Last night The Baskets opened for the first time ever, anywhere. The audience wasn't has big as we would have hoped, but they were very appreciative. It was a great experience to gauge their reactions throughout the show. They loved the opening story - an old one about the Greedy Father and the creation of basket materials. When I finished it and jumped forward millenia to the 90s, it seemed like they were a little disappointed - they were just having so much fun in the world of the First People! But they really started to get into it when I began to hang pictures up on the network of clothes lines we rigged up above the stage. When I went back to an old-time story, I could feel them kind of sit up. Something's changed? What's happening? Then they got really curious - it was our Flood story, so it was a recognizable theme, and yet markedly different from the Bible version they're probably used to. After the show, Chris and the young woman up after me in the church told me that everybody was smiling as they left. Today we're going to hit the street (there's only one in Wakefield) advertising to see if we can't bring in a few more people for the Sunday show. Also, we're going to teach a class on devising theater based on family histories.

Oh, and when I asked if anybody had ever heard of the Hoopa Tribe during the play, about three people raised their hands. So right on, Hoopas.

Our venue.

Labapalooza!

St. Ann’s Warehouse’s Labapalooza! puppet theatre is off to a touch-and-go start – but that’s as it should be with works in progress. Program A, which played last night, indicates how the puppetry rises or falls.

The high point was Adam Schechter’s Event Erasers, a mesmerizing live animation piece. Using two monitors, a projector and projection screen, and an assortment of objects to silhouette, Schechter and his collaborator Alan Calpe created a dreamy montage of sunrises and moonrises, the Manhattan Bridge and driving in the rain. When the images weren’t yet up on the big screen, watching Schechter and Calpe manipulate the small screens was a show in itself. The effect was, however, audio as well as visual. Without the ambient background music, the main event wouldn’t have had the same magic.

The low point was Elizabeth Ostler’s The Yellow Wallpaper. A puppetry adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s book of the same name, The Yellow Wallpaper tried to create a narrative about a summer-long shut-in. This attempt precluded created an atmosphere that would emanate, in part, from the puppets. Not that Ostler and her collaborators’ show needed to create pure atmosphere like Schechter’s – they could have gone for laughs like the final show, Lindsay Abromaitis-Smith’s Mental Hygiene. The audience wanted to laugh at first – the overbearing husband seeking to cure his depressed wife with the rest cure could have been a one-sided comic figure. But Ostler opted instead for seriousness. A somber atmospheric piece could have worked, as could have a light narrative piece, but a somber narrative piece about being bed-ridden all summer doesn’t.

So what did I, the non-puppeteer, learn? That in a puppet show the focus has to be so clearly on the figures that everything else melts into the background. Event Erasers did that – the piece was entirely about manipulating objects on a stage. Yellow Wallpaper didn’t because the attempt at a narrative clouded the focus on the material objects dancing before us.

Program B premieres this evening, June 1^st, at 8PM. Both programs play on Saturday and close on Sunday. Tickets are available at http://stannswarehouse.org/ or at the door.