A Week of Seeing Shows

I had a jam-packed week full of seeing shows. A few words on each:

• Darius Homayoun's a joyous shot at how things ought to be: a fourth-year independent project at New York University's Experimental Theater Wing. Darius, who comes from Dubai, is a good friend of mine from the four years we've studied together, and I was bursting with pride over this work. Conceptually, he begins with a fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm (The Twelve Brothers), presented by himself and a group of actors who, between segments, make no bones about being a group of actors. Between scenes they use each other's real names, ask each other the real time, and comment on how they think it is going. Then they hop into the story-telling, beautiful and imaginative. Soon the two world blends, and the narrative caves in on itself as Darius realizes why the story is important to him. A fantastic work, and one which I'm hoping to remount with him, possibly in the fall.
  
  
• Alex Johnson's Staging Staging: The Historiographical Consequences of Post-Revolutionary Russian Avant-Garde Performance Aesthetics: also a fourth-year independent project at NYU:ETW. As you can see, we have a thing for long titles this year. Alex's project was a non-play -- a play which fails to happen. He begins by trying to give a lecture on the Russian Avant-Garde, but is then interrupted by a group of protesters, some of which are audience members who have volunteered beforehand and been trained in what to do. Vaguely. Again, a war breaks out between Alex Johnson, ostensibly trying to give his thesis lecture, and the protesters, who simply want to make known their demands. It begins as somewhat of a satire on the dull-headed Kimmel occupation from last year, but soon takes a more sympathetic ear, as you realize that these young people may not have a purpose or direction to their aimless protesting, but they are driven by very tangible desires and hopes. Pretty soon, the audience had a pretty strong urge to join in (I'm not making this up) and we basically interrupted Alex's show to have a conversation with him about his show -- which is basically what his show was ready to accept. In today's talk-back, Alex said "I made the show fail-proof, which obviously made it success-proof."
  
  
• Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna, directed by Chilean director Carlos Diaz. Diaz used the space he was given in an incredible way -- it was long and wide, and actors spent the entirety of the show running in and out of it, and exerting massive amounts of energy. Unfortunately, that meant that when the show wasn't working, it was (as one of my friends put it), just a bunch of people running and shouting. Some of the scenes were in Spanish with no translation, which at first I was irritated by, but then I realized wasn't really a problem -- I just wasn't the primary audience, being monolingual. After all, almost none of the theater in New York treats the blind or the deaf as part of the audience -- I, as someone who didn't learn Spanish, have a whole range of theater which is open to me, so it isn't particularly a problem if just this one had scenes that were inaccessible. Sometimes the running and shouting and the acoustics of the space drowned out the words of the actors, and sometimes the athleticism drowned out what could have been a subtle and moving tale and instead made it a passionate and exhausting play, but overall it was a play well directed, and sometimes it even worked for me.
  
  
• Pipeline Theatre's Psycho Beach Party: earlier in the week, I was performing with Pipeline in their Brave New Works evening of emerging theater companies; then I was seeing their fantastic play. I haven't laughed so hard in a while; John Early as Chicklet was a virtuouso of hysterical energy for the entire evening. It was just a wild, fun romp, but I -- not familiar with the play previously -- was rather taken by the play's fun but incisive investigations into sexual and gender identity, which I hadn't really been expecting to be so forward while still being fun. Pipeline definitely holds fun to be the key virtue, and with their over-sold audience it's clear that it's working out for them.
  
  
• A reading of an original musical Who's George: my friend Sydney Matthews dug this little chestnut out of the attic, written by her grandmother, and we just informally read it in the back of Bar 82 (nice folks, by the way, who are building a little venue in a back room). The play is hysterical in its adorable genuine spirit and strange ways of saying things. I laughed even harder than I laughed at Psycho Beach Party. We may be bringing this production to the stage as well this summer.
  
  
• The Stella Adler Studio's production of Show & Tell: I very much dislike this play. It reads as though a television writer was trying to write an episode of CSI and then realized he could make it into a play so that he could get it made. There's also a lot of unwarranted romantic hoopla that just distracts from the part of it that works: a genuine reflection on what grief looks like when the catastrophic incident (a bombing of a classroom) is so horrific that it can't allow normal grieving processes (because the childrens' bodies can't be recovered). On the anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing, this had the potential to be particularly poignant. The technical aspects were also a huge failure. That being said, the actors did amazing work with what they were given, particularly my roommate and company-member Joel Fullerton. Who just found out I have a blog last night. Hi Joel!
  

I normally don't see this much theater, but I will keep trying to update you.

On The Meaning of What We Do III: Haiti, Pt. 1

Okay, so as basically everyone knows, on January 12th a 7.0 earthquake hit Port-Au-Prince in Haiti and displaced 1.5 million people. (By the way, when I googled to get references, I saw that there have been three 4.0+ earthquakes in the last 48 hours). I wasn't going to blog about it at the time because there seemed nothing to say. There was a huge devastation, there was some actually passionate reporting going on, and that was the fact. A huge wave of death and destruction.

The first On The Meaning Of What We Do post was a response to Scott Walters and his response to Tom Laughlin's post Trivial Pursuit. What does what we do matter?

So I put up a defense of our craft in general and I moved on with my life. But it turns out there's another big thorny issue in the room, and I only stumbled across it when I returned to school.

Yesterday, one of our professors began our speech class and told us what we would be doing for the first half of the semester. We would be listening to recordings of survivors from Haiti and trying to find a way in to the tragedy through our voices. He began the project by sharing with us a quotation from Brecht (which unfortunately I can't find verbatim right now) which said something like 'I will show the world who I am and what my life was like, rather like holding up a single brick and saying This Was My House.'

He tried to lead us into the moment, and we tried to explore for a few minutes what it would be like to face a pile of rubble, listening to hear if there was some quiet, nearly fading sound of life underneath it. He tried to lead us to engage with the sounds of human grief.

Needless to say, within ten minutes of hearing this project the class had devolved into figuring out whether this play was... acceptable? Responsible? Ethical? Now, as the debate unfolded, it turned out that there were a number of strains of dissent about the project. I've broken up the different strains of debate into multiple posts, simply so that I can focus on them.

The first line of debate: "Theater is about events in human history. And that history is now."

It brought to mind a lot of anxieties that come out of dealing with current events (particularly contemporary tragedies) as opposed to history. The concept of creating a work of art around the Holocaust is not, in and of itself, controversial. If someone said "and my play is set in the Armenian Genocide," very few eyelids will bat. But people -- including myself, had a strong negative reaction to the idea of doing a play directly in the wake of one of contemporary society's harshest tragedies.

And it doesn't have to necessarily still be going on. You can do a play about 9/11, for instance, but how you represent it is going to be deeply scrutinized. I get very upset and angry when I see a play that simply invokes 9/11 in passing, or tosses out the phrase "Hurricane Katrina" to remind us that shitty things happen.

Yet, at the time, the Holocaust was just as deeply effecting as 9/11. Even something like the destruction at Troy should have that same horror and trauma behind it, although it doesn't.

One of my classmates put his finger right on the pulse. He said, "Everyone's in a different place in Haiti. I've already gone through my grieving process. I've cried my eyes out already about it. And now I've moved on. But I understand for people who are not, this is too much."

The core concept behind this project is to use the empathy of the theater to try and take on others' experiences and pass them along. But when this project was presented to us, many of us seemed to feel that we wouldn't be adequate to that task. That we might be too emotionally frail to serve as a proper conduit for the current moment. One of my classmates protested with the obvious: "Too soon, too soon!"

We usually think of the "Too soon" charge as being just one of those ways in which people with conservative tastes try to tut tut the edgier section of society from having their fun -- I think mostly of South Park and their line-crossing. I also remember the bated breath about who would make the first film about 9/11; and the strange anti-climax when United 93 and WTC came out. What were we expecting?

At any rate, this is an open question to me. When there's such a deep wound -- whether personal or global -- what is it about the historical that makes it acceptable? Is it just the sum collection of society's grief process taking place? To what degree should we wait until the grief passes?