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#524 – Meta Opera

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

operacabal’s ideas for a twenty-first century opera – operashop II @ high concept laboratories, 1/28/12.

Elliot Cole, “De Rerum,” OperaSHOP II, High Concept Laboratories (Photo by Omar Robles).

OperaCabal‘s OperaSHOP II takes as its mission the exploration of new forms of opera for the twenty-first century, but the two workshopped pieces it presented were not as concerned with claiming the mantle of opera as drawing upon operatic forms to create new works. They cared not whether they were called opera. But without opera’s traditions they could not exist. By not caring whether they were labelled opera or not, they wound up realizing OperaCabal’s mission.

The double bill featured two well-matched performances—a wordy, nerdy, hypercharged, archeological hip-hop-jazz performance piece about the dawn of human agricultural and urban society  and a quiet, meditative, introspective exploration of the passing of time driven by digitally-looped violin and voice.

Like a Wagnerian Ring Cycle excerpt with a good dose of playful humor, Elliot Cole’s “De Rerum” drew upon the mythic dimensions of opera. With a crack band and a dancing libretto whose letters tumbled and swirled around a digital screen, Cole delivered serious mythos with a grin, reinvigorating the spectacle and grand scope of opera through an intriguing mix of sly ridiculousness and dead-serious purpose.

Caroline Shaw’s “Ritornello,” OperaSHOP II, High Concept Laboratories (Photo by Omar Robles).

Caroline Shaw’s “Ritornello” went in almost the opposite direction, returning to an aria form of the baroque and taking it to a place reminiscent of Andrew Bird’s music. As a piece of paper repeatedly folded and unfolded on screen through stop-motion animation now rendered digitally on an LCD projector and as Shaw used a loop pedal to record layers of harp-like, plucked violin arpeggios and sang into the pickup on her violin to add harmonies to harmonies to harmonies, one slowly got lost in the gentle repetitions. With fragments of text from Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, this was a piece about something forgotten, or perhaps even something that never took place in the first instance. It wasn’t so much a reverie or a return as a kind of emulation of lostness, a sonic and visual evocation of memory as a Mobius-strip. There was beauty in the restraint, a kind of calm, impenetrable sense of imperviousness to catastrophe and, perhaps at some lower level, deeper in the digital loop, a longing to measure how far endlessness could go, how deep stillness might quiver.

Could one get back to something that never was? This was the question Shaw asked. Could one make sense of how far we have come? This was the question Cole explored. In a way they were the very questions that OperaSHOP II itself posed. As Cole propelled the listener forward on the progress of civilization and Shaw drew us back to the stillness of self-investigation, the past and future of opera glimmered in the repurposing of its forms and traditions toward new and artful projects.

De Rerum (part 1: The Angle) from Elliot Cole.

ritornello { preview } from Caroline Shaw.

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#521 – Adapting to Domesticity

Sunday, January 1st, 2012

lucky plush productions, the better half @ mca chicago, 11/6/11.

Lucky Plush Productions, The Better Half (Photograph: Cheryl Mann).

Lucky Plush never quite got to their adaptation of the noir film Gaslight in The Better Half, but that was the point. This was a performance about breaking out of scripts, about the way that the real stories always start around the frame, drawing from it but never quite fully entering into it.

The very nature of the production—half dance, half theater—located the authentic tale at the interstice, the edge between forms. But Lucky Plush went further. The dancers kept interrupting the story to ask the director questions about their roles. They ran out of the auditorium and back in. Yet then they would move into quite beautiful repetitions of dance sequences, as if to suggest that we always must return to the gestures, hints, clues, roles, and rituals that existing scripts, films, norms, and forms provide for us—indeed demand of us.

The Better Half, as its name suggests, was most of all an exploration of the assumptions that steer courtship. How do two people move from being strangers to becoming intimate? How do they do so by entering into existing narrative structures yet also resisting those structures? When does the mystery of intimacy emerge in all its glory, and how?

The play portrayed individuals in a couple as dancers playing actors trying to grasp their roles in an old film script. But the actual plot of the film was not important. It was merely in the background, dimmed by the spotlights on the transformations happening through the adaptation. The two main dancers, a man and woman assigned the role of a married couple, were like metal filaments with shifting charges: sometimes they polarized, sometimes they magnetized, at first they were utterly strange to each other, but eventually they connected, at the back corner of the stage, gleaming and glowing even in the darkness that surrounded them.

They had kissed awkwardly at first, testing each other out, feigning intimacy, pretending to be an established domestic couple when they knew they were not. Then, continuing the dance, they moved dizzily through farce, burlesque, melodrama, comedy, theater of cruelty, Brechtian exposition, cheesy postmodern pastiche, athletic movement, startling weirdness, and everything in between until it mattered not what they were supposed to do, only that they had done it. They adapted—and in doing so were changed for the better halves.

The Better Half: work-in-progress excerpts from Lucky Plush Productions on Vimeo.

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#507 – Painting the Scene

Sunday, November 13th, 2011

red @ goodman theater, 9/29/11.

Edward Gero as Mark Rothko in Red.

John Logan’s Red appears, at first, to be almost obsessively about painting—and more particularly about the abstract expressionism of Mark Rothko. The entire play takes place in Rothko’s studio and is a deeply philosophical dialogue between the painter and his new assistant.

But as much as the play is about painting, it’s also about theater. This is fitting because according to biographer James E.B. Breslin before Rothko became a painter he wanted to be an actor.

In one of the play’s most startling moments, Rothko, played in the Goodman Theater production by Edward Gero, asks his assistant Ken, played by Patrick Andrews, to turn toward the audience. “What do you see?” he demands. For a disconcerting instance, the fourth wall is broken.

But just as quickly, it reappears. The fourth wall turns out to be the studio wall. Rothko, we quickly realize, is asking Ken to look at more of his paintings on an imaginary wall in front of them.

Yet during the rest of the play, the moment of confusion never quite vanishes. Rothko keeps urging Ken to understand his paintings as living beings, as vulnerable, fragile, spiritual subjects who long for company, attention, protection, and connection. They are people, taking us in as much as we take them in. An audience to viewers.

“What do you see?”—a simple question without a simple answer. The characters in the play look to an invisible studio wall. We, the audience, see right through it. It does not exist. We see them looking at paintings. They see Rothko’s famous rectangles, glowing in a loft in mid-century Manhattan.

But also: “what do you see?” The actors on stage see us, the audience, beyond the stage, right in the moment. They see through the imaginary paintings on the wall to the real canvas before them. We are the paintings. And we see the actors right back as they paint the scene.

A communion takes place, displayed but displaced. It’s precisely the thing that Rothko longed for his art to accomplish: the unsettling emotional power of looking hard and seriously seeing.

At a later point in the play, Rothko and his assistant furiously prime a canvas together, their backs to us. They fall down in exhaustion, spent. We watch them watch their work, which, on stage, is painting us.

With Red, you thought you were going to watch theater about painting. It turns out you’re witnessing painting about theater. In either case, it’s worth contemplating.

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#506 – Dead Letter Office

Tuesday, November 8th, 2011

chekhov ex machina: clybourne park @ steppenwolf, 10/13/11 & the heart is a lonely hunter @ steppenwolf, 10/29/11

Kirsten Fitzgerald and Brendan Marshall-Rashid in Clybourne Park (photo: Michael Brosilow)

Robert Schleifer in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (photo: Michael Brosilow)

Noticing a trend in two excellent recent plays. In place of Chekov’s gun—”one must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it”—we have the dead letter law—if a person dies early in the play, they must return supernaturally in the last scene to read the letters they left behind.

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#504 – Rovings

Friday, November 4th, 2011

quick list #3.

Sounds:

  • East of Underground (American Army bands in Germany, 1971-72)
  • Elvis Costello, Punch the Clock
  • Rubio Quartet, Shostakovich – Complete String Quartets
  • VA, That Devilin’ Tune: A Jazz History, 1895-1950 (Allen Lowe‘s compilation, insanely huge and amazing), especially Gene Greene’s extremely weird “King of the Bungaloos”

Words:

  • Wendy Lesser, Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets
  • Nick McDonell, The End of Major Combat Operations
  • Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Traditions, and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order
  • Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
  • Simon Frith, Taking Popular Music Seriously

Screens

  • Boardwalk Empire, Season 2
  • Homeland, Season 1
  • Thin Red Line
  • The Last Metro

Stages

  • Timeline Theater, A Walk in the Woods
  • Goodman Theater, The Chicago Boys
  • Steppenwolf Theater, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
  • Cloud Gate Dance Theater of Taiwan
  • Faustin Linyekula/Studios Kabako, more more more…future
  • Pickup Performance Co(s), Dancing Henry V
  • Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company
  • American Blues Theater, Waiting for Lefty
  • Steppenwolf Theater, Clybourne Park
  • Victory Gardens Theater, In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play
  • Goodman Theater, Red

Walls

  • Pandora’s Box: Joseph Cornell Unlocks the MCA Collection, MCA Chicago
  • Motor Cocktail: Sound and Movement in Art of the 1960s, MCA Chicago

 

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#496 – The Play’s the Thing

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

going meta at the mca.

teatro de ciertos habitantes with maverick ensemble, el gallo: opera for actors @ mca chicago, 4/30/11.

curious theatre branch, still in play: a performance of getting ready @ mca chicago, 9/17/11.

Curious Theatre Branch. Photo: Kristin Basta.

Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes/MAVerick Ensemble. Photo: Lorena Minor.

The MCA performance series seems to require that all its plays be about the making of plays. Going meta is the thing. So let us go meta on going meta for a moment.

Often, these self-reverential explorations are a bit too twisted around themselves, gazing at their theatrical navels. But not so with the Curious Theatre Branch and Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes/MAVerick Ensemble. These two troupes created new versions of the age-old backstage musical. But this was 42nd Street if Antonin Artaud had been the director and instead of Pretty Lady, the cast was rehearsing for some lost Living Theater production.

But that’s not quite right. These productions were not theaters of cruelty. In fact, they were quite playful and teasing as they probed the creative process more than its products. What was most intriguing was the way in which there was no fourth wall to break through in these productions. Since they focused on the making of a play rather than the play itself, one was already not watching the stage even though one was watching the stage—there were no more boundaries, theoretically at least, between backstage, on stage, and the house.

Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes made this quite literal by bringing the audience into seats on stage behind a curtain for the first half of their production, then sending them back around to the front of the regular seats for the second half. And as the title of the production by Curious Theatre Branch suggested, the troupe made the getting ready—the warm-up exercises, rehearsals, arguments, experiments, discussions—the content of their play itself.

But as much as they strived to demystify the making of a play, the two companies also sought to ramp up the mystery. Curious Theatre Branch did this by literally putting a curved ramp at the edge of the stage, a kind of hurdle that the actors had to leap over in order to join the production. And as the actors broke into smaller scenes and interactions, they would periodically shift into a weird action, more symbolic than realistic: they would assemble into one circling line of marchers that curled into itself at center stage. They became a tightening helix out of which many acting bodies became one creature, an ensemble, a being. Strange and astonishing…Busby Berkeley meets Jean-Paul Sartre.

Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes adopted similar strategies. The actors eventually stripped down to almost no clothes, as if shedding skins, before they put on their costumes for the play production within their play production.  And more bizarrely and wonderfully, they staged their backstage comedy in an entirely made-up language, so that even as one saw the actors up close—as actors rather than characters, or better said as undergoing a transformation from actor to character—one was also distanced from them by gibberish.

In both cases, what the play’s were after was that moment of transformation when the impossibly disparate, unlikely ingredients of a theatrical production congealed into something coherent. Could, they asked, a theater company portray the moment before the moment when the play becomes the thing?

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#482 – Mystery Theater

Wednesday, August 17th, 2011

two takes on mystery: middletown @ steppenwolf & chinglish @ the goodman.

James Waterston as Daniel Cavanaugh in Chinglish.

Two recent plays in Chicago suggested that in theater, there are many paths to mystery, and that sometimes the most mysterious are the least.

Will Eno’s Middletown, at Steppenwolf, tried very hard to be profound. In moments it was, as in the free-associative rants of a policeman, played by Danny McCarthy, and a wheelchair-bound and drug-addicted man played by Michael Patrick Thornton. Assigned to play Indian for sick kids at a hospital, Thornton turned his character’s fake shaman chants into something darker and more powerful. But the trying at mystery often got in the way of its appearance. The play’s closing scene, which featured a baby coming into the world as an old man died, reeked of significance. Trying to summon mystery in the middle of Middletown turned out to propose that there was a reason why it was middling. The miraculous, so desired, came to seem banal.

David Henry Hwang’s Chinglish, by contrast, was so breezy that you could miss its profound take on the mysteries of intercultural experience. Because Chinglish used dramatic irony, letting the audience understand what the characters themselves could not quite translate equivalently between English and Chinese, it left a viewer wonderfully off-balance. Teetering on the thin beams of mistranslation, a viewer was able to make sense of the bottomless gaps between cultures but was glimpsed (and more importantly heard) the bolting together of new edifices in and around confounding social interactions.

In contrast to the conventional use of dramatic irony in Chinglish, deployed inventively to probe the moment in which languages and cultures intersected, Middletown adopted a tactic more like ironic drama, in which the goal was to confuse the audience members with a flurry of seemingly disconnected and random observations strung together into shiny, poetic monologues. The confusion that resulted was intriguing, evoking a kind of deadpan surrealism that skimmed the surfaces of everyday life to emphasize their dazzling strangeness. This was fine stuff, except for the feeling that the play longed to go deeper, to get to the heart of the middle of the matter. It couldn’t let go of the dream of mystery where you least expect it. At the end, Tracy Letts tried to wheeze the play to life, but his sad old man had nowhere to go but into silence.

In Chinglish, by contrast, there was life, not death. There were words and more words and still more words. Words in English and words in Chinese and words in between. This play had no interest in silence and eternity, only the endless tumult of history.  It zipped along before resolving into an inevitable comic order tinged with predictable irony. The end was manufactured happiness, but the end wasn’t the point, the point was the process.

And the process suggested that below the easy, flowing humor there was a nagging sense that we now live in a gleaming modern office tower of babel. It teems and seethes with signs. Not just the badly-translated information hanging from walls that the main character, an American, sought to correct by selling new ones to government officials building an arts center in provincial China, but also signs in general—the labels that tell us what’s what.

Gently unloosed from stable meanings in Chinglish, directing the actors toward misdirection, the signs in the play seemed like lotus petals shaped into arrows, relentlessly pointing out the way toward the mysteries they never totally disclosed.

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#481 – When a Play Plays the Rhythm

Wednesday, August 17th, 2011

the hot l baltimore @ steppenwolf, 4/28/11.

Allison Torem and Jon Michael Hill in The Hot L Baltimore, Steppenwolf (photo: Michael Brosilow).

Sometimes a play is more about the feel and form than the meaning. Such was the case with Steppenwolf’s restaging of The Hot L Baltimore. The play, written in 1973 by Lanford Wilson, features drifters, wayward souls, prostitutes, and ghosts in a fleabag hotel that has seen better days.

Like the hotel, scheduled for demolition, the characters are all on the edge of disaster. But there’s a love in the play, and it comes from the rhythm of life forged at the margins of society. The Hot L Baltimore was almost a musical in that it emphasized crescendos, explosions, and relaxations of dialogue as noise rather than as meaningful communication. Actors interrupted and overlapped each other’s lines. Music roared forth or faded into the background. There was a feeling of accelerating down a steep hill, unable to stop the momentum, or the sensation in the play that the wrecking ball had swung back and was headed screaming right for the set. All one could do was listen, feel, and brace for the vibrations of impact.

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#443 – PDAs

Saturday, March 5th, 2011

sex with strangers @ steppenwolf, 2/17/11.

Sally Murphy and Stephen Louis Grush in Sex with Strangers.

It’s easy to characterize Sex with Strangers, which tells the story of an affair between an older female novelist fearful of sharing her second book with the public and a younger, aspiring writer who has experienced commercial success for a tell-all blog about his sexual exploits, as a “look at those young people and their mass cultural depravity!” kind of play.

At first, Laura Eason’s play indeed seems to be a distopian screed about a contemporary digital culture in which tweets, bleeps, blogs, and posts— the continual communications network of cellular, wireless, networked communication—overwhelms intimacy by exploding it into public view.

But the play is actually something far different. It is not so much about sex and strangers as it is about the intimacy of friendship. And it is perhaps most of all about that space between strangerness and friendship. How do two people cross this divide? What moves them from distanced, distrustful formality to immediacy and intimacy? Is that space a chasm that we leap? A moat we cross on a drawbridge? A ravine we dangle over? An undisclosed location in which we first, under cover of darkness, disclose our selves to each other?

Most of all, are the new communication technologies of the digital altering that space between strangers and friends. When you “friend” people on Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, etc. what does this mean not only about becoming friends, but about what it means to be strangers? Is this a privatization of public space or a publicizing of private identity?

The acting in this duet performance by Sally Murphy and Stephen Louis Grush is a stamina workout as the play explores these questions. Since the two characters are writers, the play also connects to larger questions of art, especially writing, in negotiations of the interpersonal. And since the two characters are published writers, hovering over the private spaces in which the play takes place (a bed and breakfast during a snowstorm, an apartment in Chicago) is the larger realm of commercial exchange and its effects on art-making as well as self-making and friend-making.

The play, which at first seems to contrast an older, print-based generation from a younger, online generation, turns out to be as much more about generational continuity as about rupture. It is much more about the ways in which writing carries with it vexing questions of shared intimacy from analog to digital culture.

In fact, the play might better be called Writing with Friends. The steamy affair between the younger man and older woman turns out to be less about the sex and more about the desires for public identity for which the two characters long. The young man projects the idealism of the non-commercial artist onto the older woman, whose unpublished second novel he imagines as a pure work of art against his own sordid success. As he slowly pulls her into his world of agents and publishers (even as he tries to keep her at a distance from it), his is an effort to remake himself through his intimate relationship with her. He will become, by association, through intimacies of love and friendship, a serious writer rather than a playboy blogger. The “boy gone wild” will become a man gone artist.

The older woman, meanwhile, slowly discovers that she desires the commercial success and stability that has eluded her. Half-consciously, Eason suggests, she is using the young man to gain access to the new culture of the digital and secure her own fame. Though she resists the publicized culture of sharing sexual exploits by which the man has made his fame, she agrees to post her new novel as a blog, meet with his agent, and change her novel to secure more fame.

This makes her, perhaps, not so different from the young women who sleep with the young man so that they can post their own tell-alls on their own blogs, thus securing their own public identities through private exploits. Or so Eason’s play implies, not condemning any of these women for their decisions, but rather revealing the ways in which the contemporary mingling of private sexual intimacies and professional or public desires is neither new, nor easily avoided by even those who think, on the surface, that they want to avoid it.

The twisted wireless signals of intimacy and publicity, private bodies entwined and public identities out on the network, makes this not so much a play about strangers having sex so much as about the strangeness of intimacy. And the play’s final scenes suggest that as the boundaries between intimacy and publicness change, as the household and the agora grow more seamless, we might, we must, write ourselves into being while poised at the threshold between feeling amorous and feeling agape.

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#437 – Puppet Regimes

Friday, February 25th, 2011

a string theory of two recent puppet shows.

Wonderboy and choreographer Joe Goode.

The self is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature and die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely form a scene that is presented.

— Erving Goffman

Just as choreographer Joe Goode’s use of electronic vocal effects and masks distorted the human voice in order to humanize a puppet (see CR #436), his very interest in adding a puppet itself to his dance troupe was rich with humanistic implications. For what is a dancer if not the puppet of the choreographer, a kind of dummy for the bodily manipulations of a gestural ventriloquist?

By adding a puppet to his piece, Wonderboy, Goode dramatized the question of desire in motion. He made apparent the social origins of the self, the ways in which the individual takes shape from the outside as much as the inside, from forces, often invisible, that push or pull us in certain directions, down certain paths, over to certain fates.

And yet, as the puppet himself, Wonderboy, learned to interact with those around him, as the dancers gave him life, made him animate, in a carefully-choreography bildungsroman, he also found his own story. Wonderboy became embodied, a personality, a being in the world, with feelings. Held in sway to others, he held his own.

Joe Goode Performance Group with Wonderboy.

The use of puppetry was quite different in Betontanc and Umka.lv’s Show Your Face! Their puppet was nothing more than a sack of clothes, with a hood stitched on top.

The goal of Betontanc and Umka.lv was not to humanize a puppet in order to meditate on human nature, but rather to decry the dehumanization of the individual by larger systems of power. This was a puppet on the run, panicked and scared, hunted down rather than held aloft. This puppet confronted moments of coarse pleasure among monstrous terrors, and became a new kind of invisible man, not even a man at all but rather a missing person, bullied about by invisible forces themselves seeming out of control.

There was no social self here, only a faceless bag of nothing, strung out and strung up in a rendition made chilling by the absence of even a puppeteer in charge. No one in control anymore, only a faceless, Kafkaesque series of trials, with no strings attached.

Betontanc and Umka.lv, Show Your Face!

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