Beautiful Dreamer

Dream Bridge
Created by Virlana Tkacz with Yara Arts Group and guest artists from Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan
Off-off-Broadway at La MaMa
May 2012

The Yara Arts Group presented at La MaMa recently Dream Bridge, a production based on a couple of poems by Oleh Lysheha, a Ukranian poet.

The content of the poems is mixed with the content of the actors’ dreams. We’re given an opportunity to read the poems in our seats before the show begins. I forgot about them even while I was reading. Source material is of no importance to an audience, and presenting the same content in different forms creates a jarring dissonance. Source material only clarifies stuff that shouldn’t need clarification. The Yara doesn’t need it, and we don't know what to do with it.

The production features actors dressed in white, on a small stage draped with white fabric on the sides and back. The jet black hair of the Kyrgystani actors is stunning in the bright light.

The only things on the white stage are a small carpet and an arched wooden piece suggesting a bridge. Indeed, it will represent a bridge late in the show, its most denotative moment. There are projections on the smooth upstage white, and they’re nearly always in black-and-white – a black-and-white white sea, white branches on a dark background, an abstract white miasma.

The entire show takes the loose form of a dream. One character is identifiably The Dreamer, another his younger self. The Dreamer speaks in English, not a lot and not to great effect. Other actors represent other people in the dreamer’s life.

But we don’t care about these other people, even when we can identify them. The finest moments in the production are when these actors form a chorus. From time to time, they speak in or sing in Kyrgyz – never in English – and from time to time, they whisper. Their movements – usually they move as one - have a sort of minimalist stylization, with simple, smooth crosses, not dance-like. It's meticulously choreographed and executed.

There’s no narrative, just a series of white-on-white images and largely unintelligible speech. There’s an evocative echo in one moment, a delicate shadow in another. They’re used so effectively because they’re used so sparingly, just as the entire production is delicately short.

About that denotative moment: it focuses on a short passage in one of the poems that mentions jumping off a bridge with Shakespeare. And so the actors do. The moment would seem eerie and abstract in most productions; here, it’s anti-climactic because it follows such marvelous enigma. Still, there’s a repeated line – “I didn’t recognize you, Shakespeare” – that’s mystical, suggesting that passage in the New Testament after the Resurrection.

Tout ensemble, it’s brilliant surrealism, a mysterious presentation of dream life, with all its nebulous ambiguity. We’re enrapt and we don’t know why. Our unconscious has grabbed hold of something, and all we’re conscious of is a meditative calm.

Steve Capra

Danish Post-modern

Pinocchio’s Ashes
by Jokum Rohde
directed by Henning Hegland
from The Scandinavian Theater Company

The Scandinavian Theater Company is introducing us to the Danish playwright Jokum Rohde in his play Pinocchio’s Ashes at the Theatre for the New City, off-off-Broadway. Rohde is the resident playwright at the Royal Danish Theater in Copenhagen. Pinocchio’s Ashes won for him a Reumert Award: Playwright of the Year (Reumerts are the Danish equivalent of the Tonys.

It’s impossible to locate the script’s style. It contains long speeches about its themes and a child singing a macabre song, but it also has simulated sex and brief, swift scenes of dramatic action. It borrows menacing mood from film noir and political farce from Max Frisch.

Its clearest influence is expressionism, specifically the comic expressionism of Carl von Sternheim. We find here the luscious, grotesque humor of his cycle Scenes from the Heroic Life of the Middle Classes, the humor of outrage.

Director Henning Hegland eschews any suggestion of realism and highlights the play’s absurdism. Characters don’t have personalities; they have only the qualities that relate to the situation. Scenes don’t flow with the rhythm of life; most take place in a moment of exquisite pause. There are marvelous moments when we feel like we’re watching somnambulists. The characters aren’t making decisions; they’re being pulled along by the most primitive dramatic force, fate.

But the play is too long to maintain this feeling of suspension, and sometimes it demands deliberate pacing. The actors are less successful here, as if they company is still groping toward its decisions.

From the opening, we can see that the show has a brash quality. Actor Alfred Gingold presents us with Judge Wolff, who revels in his execution of justice. Art has been banned, books burned, in this speculative society. “Thoughts of millennia up in smoke,” he gloats. Gingold’s performance is as steady as a metronome, focused and commanding.

Wolff presides over the trial of a young cabinet-maker who’s been caught with a Pinocchio puppet (i.e., art). He peremptorily orders the fellow’s right hand to be cut off, which it is.

Hegland is well served by all his actors. One of his chief accomplishments is to cast Mike James as Werner Brown, the accused and condemned. With his amiable, vacant face, James is the perfect foil for Gingold, brimming with his guileless innocence. “My treatment thus far has been nothing short of excellent,” he says at his trial, as dumb as any rube off the proverbial turnip truck.

But every choice has its cost. James could hardly be better in the courtroom scene, but when Werner develops into an active antagonist, he doesn’t make the adjustment. The depth of feeling beneath that vapid grin is never revealed.

Rohde addresses everything from art and sex to government and evil. In fact, his knot of symbolism is too complex to unravel through a performance. It’s like listening to a riddle that goes on and on until we realize we’ll never guess the answer. There are ideas that are never developed, and themes that we forget about in the intellectual frenzy of the play.

And he certainly doesn’t shy from paradox. Judge Wolff’s statements about the criminalization of art, for example, have a sort of atonal dissonance. Early in the play, he says “The problem arose when the artist, together with his new kindred spirit, the proletarian, became politically conscious.” By the play’s end, the good judge’s thinking evolves to a realization: “We tried with this law [that banned art] to teach the people about statesmanship. But in that room in the human mind where law should live we find only God.” What happened to the artist as politico?

And so Rohde keeps adding new elements to his great extended metaphor. It never becomes a tautology; it’s an open system.

Abstruse as the play is, Rohde’s deft style inspires confidence that the it’ll survive examination. And this is a marvelous production. I saw it in its first preview, and I’m sure its flaws, such as they are, will fade within a couple of performances. We want more from The Scandinavian Theater Company as quickly as possible.

Original Pronunciation

The American Theatre of Actors’ recently mounted a very admirable production of Twelfth Night. As it should always be, it wasn’t necessary to understand the lines to appreciate the play. The interpretive choices were clear and the actors excited the text with a vibrant stage life that was eloquent in itself. The accomplishment was all the more appreciated because the actors are speaking Shakespeare’s English – or Original Pronunciation (OP).

Our linguistic ancestors the Anglo Saxons spoke Old English from about 500 AD. Around 1100, with the Norman Conquests, it morphed into Middle English. From about 1500, with the Renaissance and all, the transformation into Modern English began. Words lost many of their grammatical endings (some remain, such as the ‘s’ at the end of plurals). Word order became more important.

Shakespeare’s language was Early Modern English. We can’t be sure how it was pronounced, but we can estimate pretty reliably through linguistic reconstruction. Examining the rhymes and puns in the period literature is rewarding in this respect, and there's material from the period about how the language was spoken. Finally, Shakespeare’s spelling gives us clues.

The OP gave the production a delicious distance. What’s more, it made us listen harder than we might, engrossing us all the more. As with Stravinsky, our ears learn the sounds as the piece proceeds. An initial period of befuddlement leads to a greater comfort with the them.

I’d like to have seen more tonal variation among the scenes, and the company could have taken greater pains with the set. But we hope that the ATA’s next OP production will have a considerably longer run than Twelfth Night did, and that it will get the attention it deserves. It’s important to see that creative theatre doesn’t need to be avant-garde.

Holy Crap

Last month, LaMaMa presented We Couldn’t Call it what we Wanted to Call it, so we Called it Holy Crap!! – by Iñigo Ramírez de Haro. The archbishop of Madrid demanded that the Spanish production of the play be banned, and it incited demonstrations there. As it had such impeccable qualifications, I couldn’t miss it.

This is a virtuoso solo performance by Stephen Mo Hanan. Much to his credit, he betrays no embarrassment at the behaviors he’s called upon to execute. These include complaining about constipation while sitting on toilet seats, bouncing between the characters of Everyman (sort of) and God in silly repartee, and simulating buggary.

It starts with the toilets. Then our nameless hero regresses to childhood and proceeds to present psychological abuse by the Church and physical abuse by a priest. The latter being a metaphor for the first, there’s an indisputable moral here.

Still, the play’s seering accusation can’t justify its considerable vulgarity. WCCIWWWTCISWCIHC doesn’t explore abuse, it merely stages it.

As New York audiences, we’ve seen everything. It’s an indication of off-off-Broadway’s vitality that we’re jaded to this stuff. By our standards, de Haro has merely latched on to a hot topic thinking he'll write a hot play.

The production suggests an interesting solution to the problem of changing sets on an OOB budget. There are sheets of plastic side-to-side and top-to-bottom of our field of view. The second is upstage of the first, concealed by it, and so on. Hana rips them away as the scenes change, revealing a new set with each rip. Clever.

Kashu-juku Noh Theater

From time to time the Japan Society, NYC, graces New York with a production of Noh – traditional Japanese theatre. The Noh plays were coupled with a kyogen.

The first play was brief, a mai-bayashi, a form of Noh presenting a solo performer without mask or costume.

The kyogen followed, comedy suggesting commedia dell’arte. Kyogen is traditionally presented with Noh. It’s concerned with the routine trivia of life. This play presented to servants trying to get at their master’s saki, as countless characters have schemed for wine in European farces.

Unlike kyogen, Noh is musical; the delicate music is incomparable to western tonality. Actors wear gorgeous, elaborate costume, prints and plaids. Magnificantly artificial, Noh addresses transcendent issues. In this production the play was Lady Aoi, about a virtuous women hunted by a ghost sent by a spiteful rival. The culmination is a fight between the demon and a Buddhist priest, essentially a battle between good and evil. The two glide fro and back across the stage wordlessly, to the eerie music of the traditional Noh instruments. The succuba intermittently stamps her foot, and the sound personifies the anarchic intent of the Evil One. Stunning.

No dates from the 14th century. In this tradition skills are passed from one generation to the next; the actor begins training in childhood. In performance, he uses about 25 stylized gestures variously combined. This company was Kashu-juku Noh Theater, comprised of prominent Noh actors. Its mission includes outreach to audiences unfamiliar with the Noh.

We applaud the Japan Society for their marvelous contribution to New York theatre, and we’re looking forward to the next touring Japanese company.

Thunderbird American Indian Dancers

The Thunderbird American Indian Dancers performed at the Theatre for the New City last month. It’s impossible not to admire them; their mission is to preserve the dances of native Americans

They presented 13 dances – the Caribou Dance from Alaska, the Buffalo Dance from the Southwest, the Smoke Dance from the Iroquois, the Shawl Dance from the Plains Indians, et al. Happily, we were guided through the program by the troupe’s artistic director, Louis Mofsie, who clarified each dance.

Some of the movements, he explained, have objective referents. In the Men’s Dance, crouching refers to stalking the enemy; pointing to the ground refers to following their footsteps.

Other movements once had a function. The Stomp Dance smoothed the grass to make a path and the movement of the Iriquois Smoke Dance purportedly created a draft to move smoke up through the smoke hole.

The audience participated in the Round Dance from the plains, and it was great to see the barrier between performers and audience broken. Dance is the most participatory of the arts.

It was evident in this dance, and in others, what a great difference it makes in our perception if the dancers do not face us. These dances were created as ceremonies, not entertainment. When the dancers form a circle without front, it abandons the element of show for a higher purpose.

Glorious, colorful costumes were a major element in the show, featuring the magnificent headdresses on the men. The jingles on the costumes are an inspired accoutrement, a wholly integrated percussion created by the dance itself.

The dances were accompanied by songs, each specific to the dance. It’s the musicians, not the dancers, who sing. Although some native songs are sung in a language, all the songs of this evening were in vocables, non-lexical phonemes. But they’re not improvised, like scat. When there are multiple singers, they all sing the same syllables, memorized. The singing was at its best when they sang a repetitive, hypnotic motif.

The other instruments accompanying accompany the dances were essentially drums and rattles, although other instruments might have integrated. Only twice or twice did the bear accelerate as the dance progressed, suggesting the power drums can have.

As entertaining as the troupe is, we have reservations. We’re told that the dancers come from many different tribes, although some are clearly not native.

The skill of the dancers is uneven. One young boy, perhaps ten years old, is terrific. The adults, happily, were of a range of ages, but some didn’t match the young man’s standard.

Story-telling was integrated into the evening, and while it was intriguing to hear a soft rattling backstage as out barefoot raconteur spoke, the stories lacked the pith of myth.

Be that as it may. This was the troupe's 36th annual performance at TNC, and we hope to see them for many years more.

Watt at The Public Theater

As part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, Barry McGovern has brought his solo performance Watt to New York from Dublin, produced by The Gate Theatre and directed by Tom Creed. The monologue is adapted from Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt, in which the title character slugs his way through the trivia of a spell as a butler.

McGowen starts off with the book’s opening line “The only way to speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something.” He wraps it up in less than an hour. He’s had to be very selective in developing the script, and the result is marvelous, a drop of Becket with the taste of all his poetic nihilism.

I’ve always found Beckett’s novels unreadable, but coming from this actor the prose is not only accessible, it’s actually fun. Its melody in McGovern’s refined Irish English expresses its humor, its subtlety, and its lonely pathos.

McGowen never works for effect, but disappears behind the text by an interpretive sleight of hand. When Beckett employs repetition, which he does often, and the rhythm of McGovern’s speech gives it shape and content.

More denotatively, Beckett’s words express his contempt for the Irish by mocking their words. In this dialect, third and fourth become turd and fart.

Except for two chairs and a coat rack, the stage is barren, appropriate for Beckett’s impoverished universe.

All in all, this exquisite piece expresses Beckett’s stunned disappointment with the nature of life.

Although there’s no book in sight, this performance is essentially a reading, and we’d do well to note McGovern’s technique. He’s almost always addressing the audience, but when he quotes a character he turns to the imaginary person he’s addressing. He takes on no affectation of characterization, but he acknowledges that reading in the first person demands an adjustment. The audience inevitably sees the reader as the character speaking, and the reader needs to acknowledge this.