Superfluities Redux: Buenos Aires in Translation (BAiT)

Ex-Antwone by Federico León, translated by Jean Graham-Jones. Directed by Juan Souki. With Miguel Govea (Antwone), Liz Dahmen (Ex-Retard Stella), James Ryan Caldwell (Smurf) and Video-Mom (Mother). Bryan Keller, lighting design; Marcelo Añez, sound design; Meinhard Hitti and Tao García, set design; Daniel Roversi, video design. Downstairs theater at Performance Space 122. 70 minutes, no intermission.

Liz Dahmen (Stella) and Miguel Govea (Antwone)
in Ex-Antwone. Photo by Rachel Roberts.

Downstairs at PS122 there's fragmented poetry of a sort with Federico León's Ex-Antwone. No human being should be condemned, like León's Antwone, to live morning to night in this sort of psychic landscape. An ex-drug addict, Antwone now lives in two worlds: in this, he spends his days abed with Stella, a young ex-retard for whom time has elongated like a rubber band (ten years for her, she says, is only three in Antwone's time), and despite the willing tenderness and gentle present moment that Stella offers to him, Antwone remains doomed to relive a painful past of betrayals and perverse familial obligation. A thieving childhood friend, Smurf, emerges and re-emerges to remind Antwone of adulthood's theft of childhood innocence; Antwone's mother, a yawping face on a video screen, offers no love nor tenderness, but only expresses pathetic, demanding need. Only night and sleep in Stella's arms offer Antwone any respite, this rare enough and difficult, but the only comfort from a consciousness that constantly wounds, deeper and deeper, now without the escape into drugs.

León's present never remains a present for long. The 70 minutes of the play is shattered by incursions of the past (in one memorable moment, which I won't give away, the past intrudes extra-theatrically), these incursions cyclic. It's not enough that the memories can't be suppressed, it's most chilling to Antwone that these are the same memories, over and over again, like a Moebius strip of time. So Antwone lies abed, Stella offering tender comfort that, haunted by past betrayals, Antwone can't accept.

Jean Graham-Jones offers a fluid translation here (this might as well be a broken-down house somewhere in north Jersey), and the performances are memorable. Miguel Govea brings a deeply-rooted Antwone as necessarily solid presence as a conduit for the past, the fragments held together by an increasingly stable identity (and this the only reason for hope in this world). Liz Dahmen's Ex-Retard Stella is something of a wonder here, a performance of shameless innocence as she offers Antwone her spirit and her body, though Antwone seems intent on torturing her with his and her own pasts.

Antwone suffers under the weight of a past he can't entirely relinquish; hence the characters are referred to as beings no longer fully there (Ex-Antwone, Ex-Retard Stella), instead of pursuing the pleasures and redemptions from the past that a present gentle moment offers. León leaves open the possibility that tomorrow's repetitions of the past may provide a more open opportunity for growth than today's. But it's a mere possibility; León's tragedy in miniature is a tragedy of stasis. Juan Souki's direction leads us through this repetition with grace and tender humanity, offering on occasion the same moments of redemption to the audience, leaving the performers to silently address them with an occasional gentle gesture, a smile and knowing glance.

Panic by Rafael Spregelburd, translated by Jean Graham-Jones. Directed by Brooke O'Harra. With the Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf, featuring Rosemary Quinn (the Mother), Heidi Schreck (the Daughter), Scott Lyons (the Son), David Brooks (Emilio), Nadia Mahdi (Susana/Regina), and others. Brendan Connelly, music; Peter Ksander, set design; Justin Townsend, lighting design; Anka Lupes, costume design. Upstairs theater at Performance Space 122. 120 minutes, no intermission.

Maggie Mariolis (as institutional money, insane), Heidi Schreck (as curious onlooker, confused),
and Rosemary Quinn (as bereft mourner, desperate) in Panic.
Photo by Rachel Roberts.

Panic, on the other hand, is a hoot. Spregelburd's dissection of upper-middle-class anomie takes the form of a madhouse farce, centering around the search for a lost key to a safety deposit box that holds redemption in the form of a dead man's money.

This is a family that's not entirely a family; the dead father and the living mother, son, and daughter don't even share the same last name, let alone any familial sympathy, and incest is played for laughs. The hot, mad energy of Spregelburd's comedy is essentially an entropic energy -- for all this mad running about, it's a running about in continuing decay and collapse. Divorced from the land itself (and the real estate market in Buenos Aires seems no less arbitrary and capricious than it does here in New York), the family loses itself in self-pity, in weird creativity (the daughter is a dancer in rehearsal for a bizarre Merce-Cunningham-like disaster), and adolescent sexual angst. At the center of it all is money; death is a door to greed rather than transcendence.

It's an angry, vicious humor, but it's hilarious all the same, not least because of the Two-Headed Calf's ensemble, on full, no-holds-barred comic display here. To name any of them individually would be an insult to the others, but if I didn't single out Nadia Mahdi in her two roles as the sole reasonably sane characters in the play (a psychic and the dead man's mistress), in funny, deeply felt, and sensually confident and grounded performances, I wouldn't feel quite right.

This is an unusual project for the Two-Headed Calf, which usually generates its own projects, and because Panic came to them from the outside it's an uncharacteristic show. Still, it's got all of Brooke O'Harra's signature marks -- a precise physicality (never a bad thing in farce this broad), a keen ear for language, and a brooding sense of foreboding which serves the play well. Brendan Connelly's original score, while not as integral to the production as is usual in this group's projects, is a whimsical, fragmented parody of horror film scores, and effective here, contributing to the overall riotous despair. It's a wonderfully accessible and entertaining piece of work, too.

Women Dreamt Horses by Daniel Veronese, translated by Jean Graham-Jones. Directed by Jay Scheib. With Caleb Hammond (Ivan), Aimée Phelan-Deconinck (Ulrika), Jorge Alberto Rubio (Roger), Eric Dean Scott (Rainer), April Sweeney (Lucera) and Zishan Ugurlu (Bettina). Justin Townsend, lighting design; Oana Botez-Ban, costume design; Peter Ksander, scenic design; Peter Campbell, dramaturgy; Rachael Rayment, assistant director. Upstairs theater at Performance Space 122. 75 minutes, no intermission.

In the background, Jorge Alberto Rubio (Roger) and April Sweeney (Lucera) try to cope with Aimée Phelan-Deconinck's (Ulrika) sensual excess in Women Dreamt Horses.
Photo by Rachel Roberts.

Women Dreamt Horses begins and ends with violence. As the audience takes their seats, a husband (Roger) and wife (Bettina) prowl the stage, in intense but loving physical battle, to the percussion of fleshy slaps; the percussive noises that close the play are those of gunshots. This externalization of internal sexual and aggressive drives is the core of Daniel Veronese's play about a dissolving family business, but writ large it expresses broader meditations on international violence. Jay Scheib's superbly performed, elemental production is as much a 75-minute dance piece with dialogue -- in almost never-ending motion, punctuated by tense tableaux of powerless desperation -- that points up, unfortunately, a few weaknesses of Veronese's alternately flat and lyrical script.

Rainer has called together his two brothers and their wives to discuss the closure of the family business; hosting this tendentious soirée are Bettina and Roger, who live in a half-finished loft (for which PS122's upstairs theatre, quite bare and windows open to 9th Street and 1st Avenue below, serves an eerily identical stand-in, in Peter Ksander's and Justin Townsend's deliberately low-tech design for which there are precisely two light cues: up at the start of the play, down at the end). Enter Ivan and Lucera, whose desire for a child has frightening consequences for poor Lucera, who spends much of the first ten minutes of the play throwing up; also enter, more dangerously, Rainer's wife Ulrika, who describes a screenplay she is writing about a woman's sexual reawakening which verges on a metaphorical bestiality involving horses. As the evening transpires and the characters give vent to the animalistic impulses that drive their shame, lust, and pride, the "business" (which has become, in the absence of belief, their sole constraint) disappears, and blood flows as the only, inescapable result.

The Latin American culture of machismo, demonstrated in such cultural products as the tango, gives Veronese an idiosyncratic insider's view of the ways in which physicality and gender drive society. The aggressively violent tussling and wrestling of the three brothers (one of whom is being slowly weakened by cancer) is curiously one-sided, with a homoerotic edge that also has its parallel in the history of the tango itself; the men constantly fight among themselves, occasionally taking on their partners, but the women remain quite isolated and alone, denied (or disavowing) even this violent same-sex physical contact. Bettina, an older and more mature woman, can draw aggression-as-affection from the youngest brother Roger, because she can see these dynamics the most clearly of the six characters. Ivan and Lucera's physical relationship seems stymied by their indecision about the wisdom of raising children. Finally, there's Ulrika, a walking explosion of violent mature sexuality, simultaneously threat and attraction to all of them. (Aimée Phelan-Deconinck's aggressive sexuality renders her imitation of a horse parade's angular regularity into an imitation of Nazi goose-stepping; no wonder that the self-effacing Rainer, here played in a profoundly and effectively restrained performance by Eric Dean Scott, is having trouble coping with it.)

And coping is one thing these characters cannot do; in the dissolution of traditional business, family, and gender roles, flesh, blood, and physicality are all that are left. Veronese internationalizes Argentine machismo (the character names: Rainer and Ulrika [playing on the odd relationship between Argentina and Germany], Ivan, Roger), perceiving that machismo written, though subtly repressed, in European culture as well. The aggressive sexuality that Ulrika represents is not the cause of this dissolution; the dissolution provides an opening for the expression of it (and so she is the sole explicit artist among the three women, the others finding expression in domesticity). The final moment of the play presents the threat of continued, constantly reproducing animal bloodlust. Kudos to Veronese for courageously refusing to give in to moral judgement, but lucidly recognizing the potential for unending, eternal destruction.

Not so many kudos, though, for the unevenness of the script, an unevenness implicit in its structure. Among the violences of Women Dreamt Horses is a violence between two dramatic voices. At his best, Veronese finds in the murmuring and self-erasing, cautiously mumbled hemming and hawing of everyday conversation, an objective correlative for the disintegration of identity. His more lyrical voice trips this up. The sleek, muscular, wild horse as a metaphor for desire, and the visual dynamic of animal lust as presented in the horse (so common it's even made it to the cover of the latest issue of Lacanian Ink) is a rather uninspiring insight this late in the game, and once presented by Ulrika, the metaphor remains largely unexplored, and Lucera's closing monologue verges dangerously close to the sentimental and the lachrymose.

In the noise and lucid brilliance of Jay Scheib's production and outstanding performances of the cast (particularly the three women), this weakness may be subsumed in the physicality of the 75 minute running time, and Jean Graham-Jones' translation, profoundly suited for the stage, can't be blamed for these structural deficiencies. And the production itself is one of the most physically exciting of the festival so far (that alone is saying something). A word here also for Oana Botez-Ban's costumes, which trap and repress Lucera, Bettina, and the men; Ulrika, however, is draped in a near-diaphanous flesh-colored dress that frees her for exquisite sensual movement (Phelan-Deconinck is a veteran of the Bill T. Jones and Martha Graham dance companies). Botez-Ban must be the most brilliant costume designer in the city; rarely does downtown chic meet sexual elegance like this and so expressively serve the characters and the play itself. You will, for the above reasons alone, be very sorry indeed if you miss it.

A Kingdom, a Country or a Wasteland, in the Snow by Lola Arias, translated by Jean Graham-Jones. Directed by Yana Ross. With Heather Lea Anderson (Mother), Hayli Henderson (Luba), Brian McManamon (Reo), Andrea Moro Winslow (Lisa), and James Lloyd Reynolds (Father). Bryan Keller, lighting design; Zane Pihlstrom, scenography and costume design; Sharath Patel and Yana Ross, sound design. Downstairs theater at Performance Space 122.

James Lloyd Reynolds (bottom), a contemporary Lot, in a futile gesture towards Andrea Moro Winslow, a contemporary Lot's daughter, in A Kingdom ... .
Photo by Rachel Roberts.

Zane Pihlstrom's scenography for Lola Arias' fable A Kingdom, a Country or a Wasteland, in the Snow is composed of organic materials: iron, wood, and, across a tabletop, rabbit pelts. The costumes of the family in this fable, too, are furs and leather. So Arias' play reaches back and forward, from Old Testament sacrifice to postapocalyptic natural seizure, as this conception of humanity-as-perverse-incest-survivor plays itself out. A Kingdom ... is of all four plays in the Buenos Aires festival perhaps most reminiscent of the Latin American variety of magic realism, as practiced by Marquez and Borges (though the director cites a variety of European inspirations in a program note, few of which are evident in the production).

Yana Ross' production reaches for incantatory ritual. This is a ruling family that has nothing but blank whiteness over which to rule any more. As the two daughters reach sexual maturity (and so the possibility of a new generation beckons), the mother loses herself in a haze of chemical escape as the father, sensing the loss of his own virility, dives into the Old Testament stories of fathers and children again. The daughters' discovery of a young man, also reaching sexual maturity, fractures and fragments physical and family behavior. If only they could leave the wasteland alone, to itself: instead, this family is a curse upon it, and the landscape threatens, at the end of the play, to devour them whole.

The problem with a theatre practice that tries to recapture incantatory ritual (as that of the Greeks, which Ross also cites in her program notes) is that there's never less than a streak of self-regarding self-consciousness through it. Given this inevitable challenge (and given that theatre, in the 21st century, is more distant from that ritual than ever), Arias and Ross fail more often than they succeed in reconceptualizing Old Testament myth in an age of technology (note to self: time to lock away those synthesizers from the hands of sound designers with an ear for mystical, thumping technorhythms). The production has its longeurs, but the physical investment of the performers here produces a mythical swirl of a kind, and Ross, a director who has also worked with Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek and Sarah Ruhl, is to be credited for opening these physical possibilities in mythological and anthropological contemplation.

But to the positives: The performers are steeped in the physical dynamisms that their roles (less roles, really, than representations of anthropological figures: father, mother, daughter, son) elicit; there's a comic but sleazy hangdog quality to James Lloyd Reynolds as a man whose vitality is dissipating with age, and Heather Lea Anderson as a wife who no longer sexually attracts her mate finds the emotional truth beneath that all-too-common depiction of pathetic middle-aged women who depend on pills and alcohol to get them through another day (it was an insulting and misogynistic cliche when the Rolling Stones recorded "Mother's Little Helper" four decades ago, and it's no less insulting, because reductive, today). And when music, scenery, and performance find that nexus of vertical penetration to history and mythological truth, it's well-earned and memorable.

Would that these moments were less rare in this production. Nonetheless, A Kingdom ... finds Latin American magic realism in an interesting middle phase between the fading glory of Marquez and the lyrical imaginations of young writers like Lola Arias. These interesting failures are often far more fertile for contemplation than bang-up successes. And perhaps this is the great success of the Buenos Aires in Translation festival: it points forward, to further collaboration, rather than back to a crumbling theatrical past more suited to the walls of a museum than a theater. See you in Buenos Aires next year.