PARFOURNA

The Public Theatre, Palestine, Pedagogy

Urge for Going, Mona Mansour’s new work in development, is a coming-of-age story built from the outside in. Her 90-minute play follows Jamila, a seventeen-year-old Palestinian preparing to take the Baccalaureate on the eve of her graduation from a UN school in Beirut, Lebanon. Surrounded by her two uncles, her parents, and her brain-damaged brother, Jul, in a Beirut refugee camp, her quest to take the test fights a family’s worth of dysfunction and several generations’ worth of dislocation, frustration, and regret. Mansour’s piece offers a refreshingly rich and detailed alternative to the increasingly tired theatrical image of the embattled Palestinian protagonist. Setting the piece in a refugee camp in 2003 Lebanon anchors her characters in a way that gives them a vibrant specificity. It also complicates questions of complicity and blame with regards to the plight of the Palestinian refugee.

Check out the rest of this piece on Jadaliyya.com.

THE AESTHETICS OF COMFORT

This is the first of a two-part series exploring pleasure vis-à-vis a calculated “comfort zone” in two downtown New York theatre pieces this winter.

Photo by Joan Marcus. Via http://www.vevlynspen.com/.

Early winter - that bright period before your winter coat becomes the pillory around your neck and the most hated item in your apartment - must be the best time of the year for theatre folk.  Actors and producers both eagerly warm their hands over the glowing faces of New Yorkers ready to come in from the cold to the warm hearth of the theatre.  So it’s no wonder that Rick Burkhardt, Alec Duffy, and Dave Malloy’s Three Pianos (New York Theatre Workshop, December 7, 2010) is an obvious contender for a win in seasonally appropriate theatre.  The three actor-musicians build a deconstructed theatrical narrative surrounding three (New York) friends playing Schubert’s “Winterreisse” - the composer’s famous song cycle on heartbreak in winter.  Burkhardt, Duffy, and Malloy, in their winter sweaters and slippers sip whiskey, vent about who misunderstood which thinker, and play through the “Winterreisse,” pumping their postmodernity and a dose of music history into the crusty classical piece.  If your first thought was “Cute!”, you’re close.  But don’t forget this is New York, so “cute” means “hip,” and hip means, “Please, we know what you want.”  In this case, free wine.  About a third of the way through, Dave Malloy, as the looser firecracker of the bunch, uncorks at least a dozen bottles of wine and passes them through the audience, encouraging his public to chat with one another, refresh their glasses, and pass the bottle.  From the look of things, nobody’s complaining.

Right, nobody’s complaining.  Or hardly. With the notable exception of Scott Brown’s piece in NYMag, rave reviews appeared in almost all NY print forThree Pianos upon its reformatting for NYTW after opening in 2009 at the Ontological (where it received an Obie).  Let me be clear, I have no interest in knocking down young success.  Burkhardt, Duffy, and Malloy have some talent and they seem to have fun showcasing it (cheers, fellas).  I have no beef with their success.  I am more interested in what this piece’s popularity says about us as audiences and about the theatrical market as indicator of tolerance for newness and for risk.  This piece of theatre, that seems to fit that chilled far-from-Broadway hand like a glove is the absolute epitome of culinary entertainment.  It is cut and dried to anticipate and satisfy youngish, ostensibly New York skepticism.  As Duffy and Burkhardt pedantically act out an abbreviated history of European chamber music, Malloy’s rolled eyes turn into a fevered monologue reclaiming the pathos of the music, its universality, over its maybe quirky history.  Seeing the piece approach the pedagological, Malloy’s character steers us back to what we assume is centrally important to all three actor/characters: the music, man - and not without a few well sharpened barbs at their own limitations.  I don’t like the way you sing, one says to the other.  And we relax in our seats, “Ah, good.  It’s intentional.”  All this has the effect, I believe, of creating a piece that is quote-unquote fresh - and by that I mean, edgy only in terrifically safe ways.  Here we have “experimental” theatre where actors flow in and out of character, where props float anachronistically through centuries, where pianos are played (gasp!) standing up, where homosexuality is alluded to, and where subjectivity - that of the somewhat-privileged-but-coming-to-terms-with-his-averageness, heartbroken, struggling artist - is recognized, deprecated, joshed, and reaffirmed.   Really?  This is experimental theatre?  This is Broadway below 14th street.  And these performances of New York are barely more critically creative than those available to tourists on the Great White Way.  

Why?  Why this safe creativity in a supposedly avant-garde venue?  To be sure, fielding that bottle of wine in the dark is a great alternative to the fast disappearing intermission.  But breaking the fourth wall  (or character) isn’t experimental in 2010/2011 and it doesn’t automatically engender heightened engagement with your audience.  A meaningful theatrical engagement must start with a smart, critical creativity, one that risks offending, one that risks disappointing, in short… one that risks.  This piece and the critical responses to it, along with a stream of others hosted at New York City’s premiere experimental and avant guarde venues forces the question: What are the political enjeux of the alternative theatre in this country? Are we content to be content with theatre that simply entertains at every level in the market, shifting aesthetically only to accomodate changes in say, home libraries or record collections?  The consistent but ultimately bland support of this piece forces us to ask ourselves if we are willing to fight to preserve a space for art that might fail, that might be messy, but that thinks and encourages its audiences to do so. From Brooklyn to Manhattan, rave reviews for supposedly experimental theatre indicate a worrying lack of critical perspectives articulated by arbiters of taste, exercised by audiences, and executed by performers.  Emma Rice’s Red Shoes at St. Ann’s Warehouse (December 9, 2010) was another such recent production: one wonders where Ben Brantley’s raves about the “nightmarishness” of the adaptation of the Hans Christian Anderson fable came from.  A few minutes of an exaggerated foot-sawing hardly does grotesque theatre make. When will we as American audiences again demand that experimentation actually approaches an edge?

By all means you have my vote for wine in the theatre.  But let’s make sure it’s something we’re sipping, not something that’s slipping us off to a safe, extended, winter sleep.  

The Gods of Small Things

If the first chill of September will forever remind us of school - leaves crunching under old boots in hope-these-are-cool-enough-back-to-school jeans - the fall season in the tri-state boasts quite a bit of performance that further encourages a certain youthful nostalgia.  Puppets and puppet theatre are poking their quixotic heads through the red curtain with a frequency I couldn’t be more pleased about.  (Just at LaMama and HERE Arts Center between September and December there are at least 10 different puppet-involved spectacles.)  But even better than “straight” puppets, the early fall has so far provided two examples of imaginative performance art that might be called puppetry however much the performers evade socks, googly eyes, marionettes, and YMCA party rooms.  Maria Jerez’ The Case of the Spectator (Yale Repertory Theatre, September 23, 2010) and Colette Garrigan’s Sleeping Beauty (HERE Arts Center, September 28, 2010) share an admirable creativity for play while achieving vastly different results.  Garrigan’s piece ultimately disappoints, despite her playful efforts that transform forks and sugar cubes into English forrests and ghettos. Her creative impulse, while admirable, hasn’t been adequately polished for poignancy.  Several aesthetic choices (translating back and forth from and into French, for example) have yet to be edited and risk suggesting self-indulgence.

Maria Jerez, on the other hand, has perfected encouraging serious thought while executing stimulating play.  In her piece, The Case of the Spectator, Jerez examines the female victim in pulp fiction detective novels and horror films by toying with a collection of maimed barbie dolls, a blonde wig, and a hand-held video camera.  She sits in a leather armchair facing upstage, alternately smoking a cigarette and drinking a martini in her right hand.  In front of her, a tv screen is linked to the camcorder she holds in her left.  Deftly, so as not to disturb the illusion that she is “just” watching, Jerez amalgamates a series of scenes with the dolls and plastic cars, broadcast on the TV screen through the camcorder she manipulates in her lap and at her feet.  From threats to confusion to rape to murder, Jerez layers “watching” upon “being watched” in a performative questioning of second wave feminist critiques.  We watch her and we are watching her watching herself. 

Part of the World Performance Project at Yale, an academic “preview” the evening before opened a discussion of the piece.  Professor Sue-Ellen Case (UCLA) proposed applying the idea of “spectronics” to Jerez’s work.  Spectronics, taking from tectonics, the geological concept  wherein the movements of one geological plate over another causes changes in the Earth’s surface, evokes a spectatorship that operates on and through “plates” or “planes” instead of individuals.  That is to say, as opposed to the psychoanalytic model that reads desire as stemming from the individual subconscious, spectronics allows for a reading of desire as an analysis of the social worlds that create it.  Lust, sex, hate, desire, fear become, instead of intrinsic to the individual and reducible to it, products of social, political, and cultural circuits.  Like Sarah Ahmed, Case questions a troubling national investment in representations of violence. 

But reducing Jerez’ work completely to the bones of an academic argument, however compelling, ultimately fail to do it justice.  The Case of the Spectator is so deftly light-handed; it does not preach even if it caresses rather dense critical theory.  If Jerez is questioning our portrayals of violence against women, she is also laughing at us taking ourselves so seriously.  The piece is funny.  Not because violence is amusing, but because Jerez is so playful.  A rape isn’t funny.  But a young woman manipulating a camera and half a barbie doll in an imitation of one, her breath hot and heavy on a microphone she holds in her shirt, is playful enough to evoke a room full of giggles.  And not because we’re uncomfortable at the representation, either. Rather, the moment is ludic enough that we smile at the artist’s ability to represent the serious, and critique it, without resorting to the overly dramatic. 

Ultimately, Jerez’s piece is an excellent answer to the question: how to present serious issues in an age of complete aversion to sentiment?  The post-post Age has audiences itching before the dramatic swell in the music even starts.  “Don’t push me!”  we snarl, at Earnesty.  In her lecture, Case expressed horror at the fact that the filmed version of the piece she saw, staged in Madrid, featured an audience laughing hard at various scenes of violence, especially the rape sequence.  But laughter needn’t be only derisive or disdainful.  Laughter may also be supportive, compassionate, at some level, even pained.  And that’s good.  Tragedy on stage these days fares not well.  I mean, would you want to go see a performative inquiry of critical feminist thought that tries to pull on your heart strings?  (Agggg.)  Thought, concern, and laughter needn’t be mutually exclusive.  And puppets needn’t be just children’s play.  Jerez proves both and still holds her own in the artist talk-back.  Chapeau, Joseph Roach and the World Performance Project.  Could someone get New York on the line?

Skimming the Surface

Anyone who has perused a tour book will note immediately the heavy hand of tourist-ish attractions in the sampling of Egyptian theatrical fare that follows.  I have proceeded to post them anyway, however, with no pretension of hoping to locate the “most serious” or “legitimate” theatre scene in Egypt (the performance of tourism and for tourists itself a most interesting social phenomenon).  Moreover I admit my time there lacked any significant time with Cairo’s professional spoken theatre (the biggest lacuna in what follows) and my navigations of Egyptian sociality, as a Western, if Arabic-speaking, woman, were often limited to the most imported (and least underground) theatrical events. 

Photo credit: P. Narayan.

I started my survey of Egyptain theatre at the Cairo Opera House (the cream colored complex in this photo).  The fare this summer was a mix of, not surprisingly, opera (L’Elisir de l’Amour (Donizetti)), international imports (including Japanese oud), several Arabic music concerts (the National Arab Music Ensemble), the Cairo Opera Ballet, and The Egyptian International Modern Dance Festival (June 16-30).  Nothing altogether heartstopping, if the spattering I attended was indicative of the whole.

Egypt, like Lebanon, lights up in the summer with festivals boasting artsy and outdoor entertainment.  The El Sawy Culture Wheel events, hosted on a complex of stages housed under a bridge on the shore of the Nile attract a young Cairene following.  The summer season opened with the widely popular arabico-pop band Wust El Balad, a band which regularly packs clubs like Cairo Jazz or After 8 with the least dressed Cairenes you’re likely to find (and hold on tight, in daylight you’re not likely to see those shoulder blades or full heads of hair in public).  But the more amateur performances, held in smaller indoor theatres, also draw crowds of peers and the curious.  Most interesting was a series of puppet shows performed to the music of epic Egyptian singers Abdel Halim Hafez and Oum Kulthoum.  “Puppet show” is misleading; a puppet tableau is, perhaps, more accurate.  Puppeteers move puppets around while battered recordings of the well-known songs were projected into the house.

Don’t expect a narrative, these puppets of Hafez and his orchestra are just there to give us something to look at.  The focus of the “theatre” here is undoubtedly not the visual but the aural, and while I noticed myself getting frustrated at the lack of visual stimuli, the rest of the mixed audience seemed content to be in a room with family and friends listening to a - even (badly) recorded - concert.  A reminder of the hefty cultural capital these singers of Arabic poetry still carry, cross-generationally, and in seeming defiance of high-tech, mixed-media performance.

While El Sawy’s production is local, several European cultural groups also rally to provide Cairene and Alexandrine youths with free or affordable summer entertainment.  The Centre Français de Culture et Coopération is the French embassy’s version, which hosted its annual Fête de la Musique at the Citadel with night views of Cairo.  French-Moroccan singer/songwriter/poet Hindi Zahra and her band met and collaborated with the Egyptian band El Tanbura.  Hear more from Zahra here.  (And if all those feathers have you unsure, yes, she’s GORGEOUS.)

No first-time visit to Egypt would be complete without feeling obligated to witness an amped up twirling dervish show or a Sound and Light spectacle at the Giza pyramids (or some other Upper Egypt attraction).   The latter are exactly what one might expect, but the former are more interesting intersections of tourism and cultural production.  And not because they’re any more “authentic” or “indigenous” than the booming shorthand history foisted upon tourists four times nightly at Karnak. 

The Al Tannoura Traditional Troup holds two free performances a week near Khan al Khalili in the Wekalet El-Ghouri Arts Center.  The performance literature boasts of “preserving Egypt’s cultural heritage,” but considering the almost entirely Western demographic of the audience and the pan-national heritage of Sufi twirling practices, Al Tannoura’s venture feels mostly like a “post”-colonial groping for a presentable and seductive cultural legacy.  It can’t all be good or all bad, of course, there’s something to be said for both sides of this coin but it seems to me the cultural energy spent throughout the Middle East fumbling for our pre-Colonial theatre and dance might yield more interesting results if incorporated into new creations: the discovery not of past but of present.  (A point I seem to be returning to, as regards Arab performance, both US-based and abroad.)

In Alexandria, a series of misunderstandings led me and a colleague to miss a whirlwind production of the Cairo Puppet Theatre, planting us at this distinctly “adult” theatre instead.

To be continued on another visit, perhaps…

The festival season in Lebanon, which followed this stay in Egypt, fell in pace with those of previous summers.  A surprisingly uncomfortable bout of food poisoning kept me from seeing Kuwaiti director Suleyman Al Bassam’s traveling Arabic adaptation of Molière’s Tartuffe, Hayyal Butair, at the Medina Theatre, which looked promising.  New York viewers should keep their eye out for censored Lebanese playwright and performer Rabih Mroueh opposite Catherine Deneuve in Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s film Baadi Shoof (I Want to See) showing as part of the MoMA/ArteEast Film Initiative this fall.  For more information on that compelling project, check out the schedule.

Fall beckons in New York and the new season is already underway.  “Baadi shoof” resounds as a suitable refrain, indeed.

Guest Blogging for the Segal Center this Week

PEN World Voices Festival: I Come From There, New Plays from the Arab World opened today with three new plays from Syria, Lebanon, and Morocco, and continues tomorrow from 4:30-9:00pm, featuring two new plays from Egypt and Palestine.  At the Martin E. Segal Theatre, Graduate Center, City University of New York. Admission is free.

Full length posts on the Segal Center blog, here.

Post-Palestine

I’ve been thinking about this piece for a long time - I saw it almost two months ago on 7 February, 2010.  It’s odd it’s been ruminating so long because, theatrically, there’s not much to write home about.  Najla Said wrote and acted in this one-woman show about herself, a Palestinian-Lebanese American who grew up in New York City (dir. Sturgis Wagner @ Fourth Street Theatre).  She describes and reenacts her family and her highschool experiences, her fight with anorexia, her first trip to Palestine and subsequent trips to Lebanon, the bombings of ‘82 and ‘06, and September 11.  Her nimble arms fly about the stage and her doe-like eyes entreat us to follow her as she treks upstage-downstage, right-left, New York-Beirut, and past-present. At the very least, Said’s willingness to share her experiences on a stage is worth taking note of:  especially when her portrayal of those experiences doesn’t shy away from very obvious class affiliations that would render most social art-world afficiandos/activists uncomfortable.  Coming from money is usually something artists mute (and audiences only declare with their tickets).  But Said doesn’t mask her upbringing, and this word, it becomes clear, means lots of different things: her upper-west-side teenage years, her high school peers, and elite gym acquaintances rival aunts in Beirut, her father and his image, and her mother for stage space and time.  Najla Said’s experiences, someone must have expressed at some point, are interesting because of the intersections they offer between worlds that seem wholly separate.

Which is great.  The expression of who we are is an integral, often unnoticed, part of the communication in the theatre.  Unfortunately, Said, like many Arab-American artists (in and outside the theatre), in trying to express, artistically, who she is, ends up explaining where she comes from: a venture that can almost always be reduced to the bland stock of identity politics. Palestine, unfortunately, is no exception. 

Indeed Said’s title is an initial - blatant - mistake.  The most compelling parts of her piece, the issues she returns to repeatedly, the questions she treats with the most uniqueness, the most sincerity, and the most heart are her own struggles with anxiety and with anorexia, not the 2 weeks (and relatively brief stage time) she spent as a high-school graduate, against her teenage will, in the Palestinian Territories.  She enacts her mother incredibly well: a matron expressing frustration over her teenage angst and depression, doting over and scolding at the same time.  But Said, as one assumes her audiences - not just in the theatre - have taught her, sidelines her own very real physical struggles and her relationship with her mother.  Instead she frames this work around the legacy of her father, the illustrious scholar, Edward Said, and her all-too-brief experiences in a country even the most apathetic New Yorkers have heard whispered with anxiety, and a part of the world “mainstream” America, for multitudinous reasons, continues to misunderstand.  Said’s instinct is to expose her audiences, to explain to them there is beauty in places they may have written-off, and to make a case for Arabs and Arabism.  I can’t say that these instincts are wrong.  But they must be read against racist trends concerning, as Said herself has called them, “visibility” politics.

In an interview with the Institute for Middle East Understanding, Najla explained,

“You find that because you’re Arab, you’re automatically politicized […] You’re only called in to audition for a woman with a veil or a terrorist’s wife. I decided that I wasn’t going to let them tell me who I am, I’m going to tell who I am. Every time you’re on stage you’re making a political statement because you’re Palestinian.”  (Full article here.)

But instead of actively working against this restrictive trend, Said’s work here re-inscribes much of the same identity politicking.  Instead of creating something that shows us how the young woman’s mind works, she gives us a laundry list of bombings she’s lived through.  Instead of creating, she regurgitates.  If you’re unfamiliar with the laundry list or the history, mild titillation, but most likely sympathy, may be the result.  But if, by chance, you share her political or cultural history, what’s left? 

As a a young Arab-American spectator, I’m bored and I’m lonely.  I rarely see how an artist (musician, poet, visual artist, etc) who openly identifies as Arab-American actually reacts to their world, because every time I see or hear their work and am encouraged to recognize it as such, I’m slapped with corrective explanations of Israel, of Lebanon, the West Bank, or Gaza.  In other words, to be an Arab-American artist has too long meant to be a certain kind of political subject.  How are we to move past the identity politics Said herself bemoans if we keep pigeon-holing ourselves with the work we produce?  How are we to teach younger generations of Arab-Americans what our experiences growing up in this country have been like, and how to live between cultures, if our art continues to explain the experiences of our parents or our cousins, or the traumatic political situations we have also, cyclically, found ourselves in?  We must create an audience that is willing and eager to see Arabs and Arab-Americans not as indicators of political strife but as feeling, emotive, creative individuals in a postmodern society.  Conscious and sentient, and at the same time struggling with things we, ourselves, haven’t figured out.  Said’s work comes closest to this in her anecdotes about her teenage anxiety and anorexia.  But she never gives those anecdotes the structural attention, within the larger piece, that they deserve.

All artwork is political.  Its political affect, however is up to its creators.  That is to say, a piece called Palestine, performed by the daughter of Edward Said, is political, for obvious reasons.  But a piece by a bi-cultural individual living in New York  with or without anxiety in the 21st century is also political, not because of what it includes (a history, by extension) but because of how it is shaped (its poetry).  I fear, as an artistic community, Arab-American artists openly working as such have forgotten that we don’t have to pick up where the BBC negligently left off for our work to be effective. What would happen if we assumed our audiences were familiar with our political/historical/cultural references and focused the energy instead on something else?  Where would we find poetry?  Where would we find politics?  Towards a postmodern expression of lived bi-cultural experience in this country, what would there be post (explanations of) Palestine?

All of this is not to say that the attention given to organized or cultural anti-Semitism [sic] and (especially) to Palestine by young hip-hop artists, comics, playwrights, or poets is misplaced.  Nor is it to suggest that young people rejecting the Middle East narrative bought and sold wholesale in this country are cheating themselves or their countrymen and women.  But we must hold ourselves to an artistic standard at the same time.  We must remember that sometimes, especially in art, it is the individual and not the community that is most powerful.  Her vision of her world should be breathtaking: without explaining it.

                                                        *      *       *    

Fear not, those of you following closely, February’s challenge concluded with flying colors: 17 pieces between 29 January and 28 February.  The added performances were the Theatre of the Two-Headed Calf’s Trifles @ the Ontological Hysteric and Radiohole’s Whatever, Heaven Allows @ PS 122.  A considerable unforeseen hitch in my experiment seems to be that I have deepened an already inexplicable addiction (to the theatre). Posts to follow here at a considerably slower rate.

Zagreb Youth Theatre

For work as strong as this, best to put the group’s name in bold and hope it sticks.  Google ZYT and you’ll get a dozen preview announcements for director Ivica Buljan’s newest work at La Mama (6 February 2010), littered with references to the film Fight Club and qualifiers from “physical theatre” to “violent phantasmagoria.”  Buljan’s The Garage (based on fellow Croat Zdenko Mesaric’s novel of the same name) is a theatrical spectacle based on the human body, but an Eastern-European Fight Club doesn’t come close to revealing what’s hypnotically mesmerizing about this piece.

1.  Human Bodies plus Human Story.  Binat (or “Peanut,” as I heard all evening) is a 10-year old boy turned pit fighter by his drunk father’s desperation.  Drunk, miserable, and destitute, his father trains (read: beats) him and then pits him against opponents twice and thrice his age and size in the underground holes of an illicit fighting ring somewhere in the rural expanses of the post-Soviet block.  Binat’s diabetic mother is her son’s only source of tenderness, but between nursing her own illness and her husband’s drunken abuse, she ultimately cannot protect her son from the physical destruction he surely faces.  A Priest, once in love with Binat’s mother and convinced of his paternity to the boy, repeatedly attempts to step in, but his cravenness and Binat’s loyalty to the only father’s love he has ever known prohibit him from a real impact.

After winning a reputation for himself as “the Claw,”  Binat comes up against an opponent that he cannot beat, a fight that leaves him paralyzed from the waist down.  In a final attempt to make some money off of the boy, his father breaks him out of the hospital and carries him back to the ring to negotiate one last fight with the bookie.  Broken in half and his body half-carried by his father in an uncanny mirror copy of his now dead mother’s, Binat is reduced to a crying bag of bones.  The Priest attempts to intervene on the boy’s behalf but is shot and killed in crossfire.  What happens to Binat at the end?  Does his father change?  Or does he abandon his son who, alone, dies?  The last scene is a heavy metal solo sung/screamed by the boy.  It is a number that clearly drains the actor, Vedran Zivolic.  What happens to his character?  Does it matter?

Alongside this story as it develops, the ZYT production weaves an ad campaign/festival for euthanasia tourism and an on-site tour of such a “clinic.”  The Beat Fleet, a Croatian rap-rock band, also share the stage, providing the soundtrack for the story and the theatrical world Buljan and his cast create.  Mesaric’s story is loaded with abuse, neglect, greed, filth, and sadism but the way it’s brought to life completely skirts melodrama, pity, or social naturalism.  Father and son’s brutal interactions (“Brandy!” Binat rushes him a test tube, his father downs it, then spits it out in one motion and in the same motion, Binat catches it) are as if danced; the bribe sex between father and the bookie’s prostitute so real you could smell it (of course she removes her panties, why do we believe sex on stage (or screen) when this doesn’t happen?) - but yet at the same time, and on the same 8 feet of stage space as this violent physical exchange, Binat moves his mother’s corpse, her arms and legs, in an incredulity of loss that is so poetic as to escape any notion of reality except the musical.  Minute after minute, and one after another square inch of skin, Buljan and his team bares realism that bites with poetry in single, breathtaking gestures.  Instead of just the disgust at mankind that Mesaric’s human story could provoke, combined with ZYT’s virtuosic embodiment, we instead amaze at the collaborative human spirit.  How can a group of men and women come to move us so entirely even when we know, we know they aren’t real?

Photo credit: Zita Bradley

That, of course, is the question driving any appreciation or apprehension of the theatre; and “real” is an idea so sticky as to conjure drying concrete.   My intent is not to stumble head-first into the theoretical lime pit, but to commend the Zagreb Youth Theatre on what is undoubtedly their strongest asset: the incredibly high caliber of their acting.  Which brings me to the second of two points outlining the piece’s success: 2.  Commitment to Embodiment.  Zagreb Youth Theatre’s actors: Ksenija Marinkovic, Doris Saric Kukljica, Nina Vioilic, Barbara Prpic, Sreten Mokrovic, Frano Maskovic, Vedran Zivolic, Gordan Bogan, Sasa Antic, and Mladen Badovinac prove without doubt that the “Young” in their group’s nomen hasn’t the slightest to do with the amateur or with children’s play.  Not once does an actress fidget with her clothing, or turn her body to keep from over-exposing herself (neither does the exposure of skin ever feel forced or pornographic, even during sex); not once do we see an actor restrain the force in his punches to keep from abusing a colleague.  Binat’s father, Frano Maskovic, is nearly the play’s hero, despite his despicable actions: he flows over stage like a wave, while still preserving an elasticity with Binat and the women.  The trust within the team and the commitment to the aesthetic is so complete that the spectator is literally left marveling at the quality of the craft produced - not at the illusion they produce but at the quality of its production.  These are actors and a director who know their craft and their strengths (lucky for us these are one and the same) and who have premiered a work that turns heads.

More research remains to be done, for sure, on their process.  But if it’s a model that can be copied, the rehearsals at ZYT’s studios in Teslina 7, Zagreb have much to teach all of us… as far as craft and expectation, both.

Ten Points for Epic Storytelling

First of all, who knew there was a grotto in New York City?  A cave carved by water that (among other things) produces an echo?  Well, there is.  And the Church of Notre Dame is built on it.  But this modest natural attraction isn’t the only surprise hidden in that corner of Morningside Heights.  The Church is also home to The Storm Theatre, a group which, in association with Blackfriars Repertory, are presenting the Paul Claudel Project, a three-part series bringing to life the dramatic works of the French dramatist and diplomat of the same name.  The second part of the project, an abridged version of Claudel’s 1931 epic play, The Satin Slipper, or The Worst is not the Surest (5 February 2010) was brought to my attention via Professor Marvin Carlson’s Tip Sheet (http://web.gc.cuny.edu/theatre/tipsheet/index.html).

It’s hardly the hottest (read: hippest) show in town, nor the least polemic.  Where are the works of Claudel - the fervent and controversial 20th century Catholic - being shown?  In New York City’s historical home of French Catholics.  (Then again, hold up.   A theatre in a church?  We can argue about the Church’s manipulation of the performative and there is of course, the history of pageant theatre associated with religious holidays, but a commercial theatre within church walls?).  In any case, where else is one to see a nine-hour (trimmed to three hours in this production) love story spanning three continents and at least as many decades?  Unities, look out!  With all the Baroque action and Catholic imagery, it’s hard to remember that Claudel was writing in the aftermath of the Armistice at Versailles (1919), not the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), and that his contemporaries included the “truth”-obsessed André Antoine (not say, Lope de Vega).

Taking Rimbaud as inspiration for his verse (as opposed to Meinigen as inspiration for staging as Antoine did), Slipper is a story of unrequited love between Dona Prouheze  and Don Rodrigo.  It starts in siglo de oro Spain, moves to Africa, spends time on the Atlantic, continues to Panama, relays back to Prague, advances to the Gulf of Mexico and rests, at last, on a port somewhere in between.  Angels float in and out, Time fast forwards and rewinds, honor and desire are scourged on stakes, and murder, rape, and promises are committed, kept and broken.  The basic gist of the story is this: young Prouheze falls in love with Rodrigo and he with her, though she has, since a young age, been married to the much older Don Pelagio.  Jealous, Pelagio sends her, alone, to run the colony in Mogador, Morocco where he no longer trusts the corrupt Don Camillo (also in love with Prouheze), to maintain the outpost against hostile natives.   When her armies falter, Prouheze consents to marry Camillo (Pelagio now dead) and bears a daughter who she claims is Rodrigo’s.   She sends her lover word in a letter which circles the globe for ten years before reaching him.  When it finally does, Rodrigo, now the head of Spanish colonies in the New World, sets off for Mogador only to refuse Prouheze there on a technicality regarding defeat, imperial dictate, and Camillo’s command.  He takes the daughter at Prouheze’s request and continues his whirlwind, but now disgraced, battles with the world and the Spanish Empire.  The play ends when Rodrigo, stripped of his title and being sold into slavery, implores a nun to take him at the convent.  She accepts, completing an arch of the story that started the play: in the first scene, Don Rodrigo’s brother, a Jesuit priest lost at sea, prays that his brother find God.  Though dead, we may assume that brother found peace.

The story, despite its obvious proselytizing, is a fascinating one, the type to shut up even the most bored among us.   And the Storm Theatre production is strong enough to encourage a viewer to go back to the text.  Which is, I suppose, a backhanded compliment.  For although the production team and actors manage to hold us for the full three hours, they remain the weak links in a narrative that starts with Claudel and ends in the audience’s imagination.  Director Peter Dobbins and his cast deserve credit for braving the complicated and challenging work with integrity, but Claudel wins for innovation.  Meredith Napolitano, Harlan Work, and Ross DeGraw stand out as Prouheze, Rodrigo, and Pelagio, respectively.   They are a remarkably good-looking cast, in general, though not hot enough to mask rather disastrous costuming.  Game, set, match: what brings us to theatre?  Well, story, of course.

The Refresh Button

Misha Shulman’s play - about clones - proves that repetition in the theatre need not be hair tearingly-dull.  Indeed, his portrayal of the cyclical nature of human existence in the futuristic bildungsroman, The Fake History of George the Last (Theater for the New City dir. Meghan Finn (4 February 2010)), affirms that “even” the “straight” play still has much to offer its audience.  And thank goodness, after the day before, I had nearly given up.

Even if you didn’t know that Shulman - a former Israeli soldier turned playwright/director - has written critically acclaimed plays treating both sides of the Palestine-Israel conflict, and even if you missed the program notes quoting the Book of Ecclesisastes, it’d still be impossible to miss the resonances in Shulman’s playscript.  On his sixteenth birthday, George Junior receives the same birthday gift his father, George Senior, received on his sixteenth birthday: he learns that he is a clone of his father.  George Junior resists this news, as any teenager might, tearing off his sweater to reveal a Circle-A markered on his t-shirt.  In an eerie and wholly effective use of theatrical technology, the DVD projection of his father’s own sweet sixteen mimes him on a 3-second delay.  And so the young man struggles with the knowledge that he is and will be a copy of his father, down to his choice in a bride and the decision to clone himself when they have children.  This may, indeed, be creepy enough, but Shulman layers his story with what feels like the weight of history when the grandson turns thirteen.  At this time, according to family tradition, the voice box of the grandfather must be removed by his son (assumedly, with age, one learns things that would jeopardize the continuation of the line).  On the ritual visit to the tomb of the first George, an ancient spot that has been threatened repeatedly by bulldozers and construction (hint, hint) Jane, George Senior’s wife, resists the news of her husband’s voluntary maiming at the hands of his son.   Frustrated by this show of disrespect for his lineage, her husband kills her, continuing a part of the family cycle even he was unaware of.  The drive to ensure “the line,” Shulman argues, turns men into rabid robots.  The playwright deftly pits nuclear family values (the sanctity of my son, my husband, my wife) against the continuation of genetics: a distinction most discussions in the Middle East (on either side) usually omit.  What is survival for, he seems to be asking, if it’s just survival?

Despite strong directing choices and design choices, however, the production on a whole felt mostly muddy.  Sarah Painter and Erika Helen Smith stand out as Jane and Janey, and while Jared Mezzocchi (Geroge Junior) holds his own, both Priscilla Fores (Grandpa) and Ben Jaeger-Thomas (George Senior) struggle to capture and hold our attention.  Regardless of this amateurish haze, Shulman deserves credit for a subtle and yet clear play that creatively challenges our political sensibilities.  Refreshing, indeed.

College Continues

Sure the props have changed from PBR to Shiraz, and the words from dining hall complaints to compliments of the host’s home-made goat cheese polenta.  But an evening of one-act plays fails to push the envelope, theatrically, and still topically depends on 1) drugs and their aftermath; 2)  morning-after-one-night-stand awkwardness; 3) My best friend wants my girlfriend; 4) Are we gonna be ok? and 5) Mom never loved me.  Too Little Too Late, a collection of six one-act plays from “six of the most promising and arresting young writers on the New York scene” at HERE Arts Center (3 February 2010) feels like a slightly grown up, slightly more expensive, slightly more impressive - but ultimately sophomoric - continuation of the senior seminar on Advanced Playwriting.

I struggled a lot with my expectations and reactions to this evening: it’s been a long time since I went to see “just” a “play” about “us.” That’s not accidental.  And this collection didn’t offer pretense to anything but that: “six original stories that explore the problem of disconnect in a complicated world” (HERE website).  So, Rayya, if you’re not into plays, don’t go.  Go get yourself a ticket to the new Radiohole show or whatever is tickling your fancy and leave these young playwrights alone. Sure, that’d be easy enough.  I could say my tastes have matured and draw up an imaginary barrier -  I’m into this, not that - and roll my eyes and feign offense when other people can’t tell the difference.

But growing pretension out of my ears is a pastime I could live without.   And I can’t help but wonder what these playwrights (Lucy Alibar, Bekah Brunstetter, Sam Forman, Amy Herzog, Elizabeth Meriwether, and Daniel Talbott), these directors (Portia Krieger and Moritz Von Stuelpnagel), and these designers (Bart Fasbender, Kenneth Grady Barker, Qui Ngueyn, Dustin O’Neill, Abbi Stern, and Paul Toben)  found interesting or challenging or vital about the work they were producing.  Is plain old naturalism still compelling?  Why?  Are our quotidian lives, jacked with the same old kitchen-sink tricks (“I left a note on your dresser,” “You made that up just to trick me?”) still revealing things about our collective lived experiences?  What was so urgent that you needed to tell us?  Text messages are annoying?   What are you riding that’s holding and not letting go?  Some fire, please!  (To be fair, “Mommy Says I’m Pretty on the Insides” by Lucy Alibar isn’t exactly a naturalistic play and she pushes the form a little bit further than the others.)

The actors, for their part (to be content with a part!), held their own.  Anna O’Donogue shines in one or two roles and, if you watch these things, keep an eye (or two) on Daniel Abeles.