Obscene Jester

on marionette and metonymy

Theatre history is glutted with practitioners and theorists who hold puppets and performing objects up as an ideal, as the utopian future of acting and theatre itself. Craig had the übermarionette, Kleist the marionette theatre (and fencing bears—natch), and Moholy-Nagy had the mechanized eccentric. Many critics working today discuss new technologies in animation and virtual reality as the new wave of this idealization.

But these theories usually concern themselves with the actor alone—the puppet is the performer void of ego, emotional and physical error. It may be entirely controlled. And this has nothing to do with why I return happily to Labapalooza at St. Ann’s every year.

For me, what makes puppet theatre some of the most interesting and innovative work is its reworking of the very materials conventionally associated with performance. Actors may become puppets, but scenes become miniaturized and manipulated, attention is drawn to unexpected elements, and the use of metaphor and metonymy is at its most considered and refined. And this year was no exception.

The Lab’s emphasis on the works-in-progressness is wonderful as well, exceptional even for most performance the public is let in on. I only saw one program this year with four incredibly diverse pieces.

The most stunning for me was Daniel Burnam’s and Erica Livingston’s “Interference and Collapse,” a piece most improbably about the murder of Sam Cooke, childhood memories, and quantum physics. Burnam and Livingston remain behind a glorified DJ booth for most of the performance, where the turntables function not only as soundtrack, but also as stages. Each mini-set is divided into three, with each division symbolizing the same place in a slightly different dimension. The very possibility of quantum theory has made the question of “What if…” almost more tragic and mournful. Not only do we make bad decisions, but, in a slightly different place, we have made the correct ones. The course of our histories radically alter, but we have no access to them. What if Cooke had lived well into old age? The duo plow through the text, Burnam with the cold pat of a scientist, and Livingston with barely concealed childlike frivolity under a veneer of professionalism. All their scenes are augmented by video camera’s projecting the tiny, revolving action up on high.

Retta Leaphart’s “Far from the Tree” is a sweet rumination on childhood as well, only from the much more direct perspective of growing up in Montana. The protagonist is a large mason jar with limbs and head as bugs and secrets are collected and released from within.

The hilarious “The Pigeoning” by Robin Frohardt was clearly adored by the audience, the most basic and stunning example of the audience’s almost desperate desire to empathize with these objects. Here, we follow Frank, expertly played by as many as four puppeteers at once, a schlubby office drone with an irrational (or highly rational, depending on where you stand) fear of pigeons. That is, until the day he realizes that the pigeons are communicating with him. His world falls apart, and the audience erupts into great cheers for the slightly morbid conclusion. But Frank is happy, and so are we.

Last and certainly not least is Joe Silovsky’s “Send for the Million Men.” I’ve written about Joe in general and about his last piece here, and he brings Stanley the Robot back to help him narrate a (piece of) the story of infamous anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. In his usual puppetry-by-way-of-vaudeville style, we’re treated to a messy and discombobulated lecture that utilizes transparencies, opaque projectors, and a cadre of controls for Silovsky to play show-and-tell with. Joe’s continuing efforts to layer and nuance his works while maintaining his charming sense of humor and irony constitute the playfully sophisticated work that I love from this genre.

One hundred years after the publication of Craig’s ideas concerning the übermarionette, we are no closer to realizing it, if you ask me. And I like it that way. Vivent les blagues des marionettes!

 

[for charity]

Normally, I don't push for charities in a forum such as this, but I couldn't resist commenting on the new project, Cage Against the Machine. The concept is simple--get a bunch of celebrities together to record John Cage's masterpiece, 4'33", and donate all the proceeds to charity.

Admittedly, the idea is hokey and has been overdone by numerous parties, from revivals by Tudor himself to my own undergraduate students (love you guys!).

The idea gets complicated and much more intriguing, however, when you begin to discuss issues of celebrity and record charts, and account for the cultural divide--the top Christmas-week single is an American-Idol-huge deal in the UK.

Exhibit A: many of the recent toppers have been the winners or contestants of X-Factor, Simon Cowell's pop show there.

Exhibit B: revisit Love Actually. Or don't, and just remember the burnt-out rocker storyline, also admittedly lame but illustrative for our purposes here.

I'm a bit of a humbugger myself, and although it's not exactly a stroke of brilliance, CATM a cheap and fun way to give this season. And Billy Bragg coughs on it, by Thor. I'll pitch in for that.

a haunting in los angeles

Once this house was alive, it was occupied once. In my recollection it still is but by shadowy occupants like ghosts. Now they enter the lighter areas of my memory.  —Tennessee Williams, Vieux Carré

The Wooster Group’s version of Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carré, now at the REDCAT in LA is surprisingly revealing, both on behalf of Williams and the Wooster Group itself. The form of Williams’ uneven memory play brings out many of the most brilliant themes, devices, and resonances, both for Williams and the Group.

Vieux Carré was recently claimed by historians to date back much further than initially expected. Although Williams polished the play off and produced it for the first time in 1977, the notes, sketches, and drafts can be seen dating back to the period when Williams was living the story in a French Quarter boarding house in the early 1930s. In other words, the play is a filtration of raw memory, refined over decades, and revised with experience, maturity, a bit of cynicism, and hindsight. What a rare opportunity it is to access memory in this way, whether ours or someone else’s.

And it’s exactly this lengthy incubation process that makes Vieux Carré so uneven as a play. The Writer (Williams’ avatar) seems to grow from closeted greenhorn to over-sexed and exhausted man in a matter of acts for the audience and months in the world of the play. It’s as though Williams translated a piece of his sixty-something self to the arc of his twenty-something self, almost as if he has condensed the life of all his memory plays into one series of dramatic action. It’s confusing, disjointed, episodic, by all accounts a bad Tennessee Williams play. But it also contains some of his most potent lyricism and concentrated impressions of the city he loved so much, and it features multiple Tennessee Williamses—permutations of his young self set upon by layer after layer of an aging, less successful playwright.

Leave it to the Wooster Group, then, to exploit this point and bring the piece a wealth of new meaning, sympathy, and power, Employing techniques they’ve used in past productions, this version is one of the most amazing interpretations of how and why we remember, beyond the playtext. Their main theme is a sense of ghosting, haunting—words that they could easily use to replace an empirical sense of memory. So it’s inevitable that Williams knew a character like the Nightingale, an old queen, slowly dying of TB, or Tye, a homophobic (and of course curious) strip club barker and junkie in the boarding house. But it’s also clear, with the help of Scott Shepherd’s brilliant turn as both characters, that they are aspects of Williams himself—how these men-turned-memories became a piece of the playwright. Or, one could argue at the very least, that these memories haunt the playwright constantly. Scenes occur with characters who aren’t physically present, with characters who never existed, and sometimes with doubles of characters, a surplus of memory. Kudos to Andrew Schneider’s video design and Jennifer Tipton’s lighting to help this ethereal feel. Video screens contain simple white curtains, gently billowing with the breeze, and rain is projected onto the characters as static, a televisual presence of absence.

Watching the play, I was transported to my own memories of earlier Wooster productions: the plasma TVs on beams, fragmenting the body in To You, the Birdie! and cueing physical action in Poor Theatre, the layering and mixing of live and recorded on televisions, mixing the performance and past art as in Hamlet. It became clear to me that all of the Wooster productions are investigating the nature and complexities of memory, remembering, and, vitally, recounting and retelling. To use Vieux Carré makes this painfully obvious—and I don’t mean this in either a laudatory or derogatory sense. If anyone can get away with superficiality in presentation, it’s these artists.

As always, there’s way too much meat to chew on here. I am constantly frustrated and thrilled by the infinite wealth of ideas that speed through my mind when thinking about the Wooster Group (good thing they’re in my dissertation!—oy). I get a little overly excited: driving home, I went on an unsolicited diatribe to my car-mate(/prisoner) about Why would anyone in their right mind want to stage naturalist performance when that is possible?! Why would people want to watch it when they could be engaging with this?! WHY?!

But to leave you, I’ll start at the beginning, as the wonderful Ari Fliakos sits at his keyboard, attempting to begin a chronicle of his time in the French Quarter, listening to the bickering of the landlady (Kate Valk) and Nursie (Kaneza Schaal). The three characters are all present on stage and on screen, but as they set the scene, it becomes somewhat noticeable that the audience’s eyes and ears cannot be trusted: the image on the video screen is not the live stage action, the sound, is not coming from the actors’ mics. Our impression of what’s happening—filtered through the Wooster Group’s collaboration, through the text, through the muck of forty years of separation and consideration, through Tennessee Williams’ experiences—is unreliable, untenable. But it certainly does haunt.

just the facts: vol. 1

Lousiville Orchestra Files for Chapter 11.

Kentucky Governor Steven Beshear announces plans to build new theme park, Ark Encounter.

Perhaps laid-off musicians can get a gig playing Handel's "Messiah" near the Via Dolo-Rollercoaster (trademark for OJ pending).

retire or die

Being somewhat of a geek and follower of posthuman hoopla, I get excited about all things Philip K. Dick. The literature, the fan culture, the absurd theories, the films, comic books—there is an entire industry based on the improbable life and works of Dick. One realm that has yet to be infiltrated by Dick Culture (and, I would argue, science fiction in general—but that’s another post for another day) is performance. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: performance is always the last one to the party. Partly due to resources, partly due to an implicit conservative undercurrent, sci-fi/fantasy has gone largely unattempted in the theatre. The closest we’ve really come in recent years is Cynthia Hopkins’s The Success of Failure and the I’ll-reserve-my-adjective-till-all-facts-are-in Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark (which, I can say at the very least, has an incredibly silly title). It’s a shame, really, considering theatre has even created some forms of science fiction (see: Capek’s R.U.R.).

So imagine my delight when I discovered the Untitled Theater Company #61 was staging an adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, one of Dick’s more famous stories and basis for the classic film, Blade Runner. The layered, confusing, and hypermoral narrative takes place in the future when AI has become so advanced that special detectives and bounty hunters are employed to detect and “retire” rogue androids who are trying to pose as humans on Earth. (You see? You see? There’s a hazy difference!)

Untitled Theater sets up a fascinating stylization that combines the 50s obsession with futurity and morality (instructional films about proper behavior for men and women, as well as the famous “duck and cover” short play on pod-like film screens before the show begins—kudos to set designer Neal Wilkinson and video designer Jared Mezzocchi for their resourceful and evocative use of space and imagery). Open on our protagonist, Rick Deckard, hunched over a maimed sheep-android, seemingly mourning the loss of the pet he has destroyed: a striking image, which remains as the robot-body parts are left strewn about downstage as a reminder for the piece’s entirety, leaving an expectation of a system and story that is already broken.

The show’s main asset is director Edward Einhorn’s adaptation of the novel. As per most Dick novels, Do Androids Dream is a baroque and intentionally befuddling story. Any attempt to condense and communicate Dick’s intentions (for what those are worth) is a massive undertaking. If you don’t believe me, compare the novel with Blade Runner—there’s a reason beyond marketing that they had to alter the title. But Einhorn boils the novel down to a solid 90 minutes of live experience, and covers most of the thematic and narrative bases.

To continue what I found to be the fixation with 50s noir, Einhorn’s dialogue is spit out by almost every character with the sauciness and confidence of Rosalind Russell, a cadence that became grating quite quickly. While I appreciate the homage to an appropriate genre, the form overpowered the content, and the stylization became overbearing—I would have preferred that the company allow the deft text to speak for itself. For a text so focused on agency, free will, and the definition of “human,” the forced sensibility and physicality merely reminded me of how far robotics and AI must advance before Dick’s dystopian universe may be realized.