Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Tuesday, 15 January 2008
UPDATE: Ironically, on the very same day as LaBute's article appears in the Guardian, a press release relating to The Fire Department's At War: American Playwrights Respond to Iraq winds up in my inbox. The show will present excerpts of new political plays by writers such as Jessica Blank & Eric Jenson and José Rivera, with a cast including Bebe Neuwirth and David Strathairn. Perhaps Neil's just on the wrong mailing lists.
As
part of the Guardian's new Tetchy-Playwright-of-the-Week
series (apparently launched with 3 January's interview of Edward Bond), American playwright
Neil
LaBute takes time out on the eve of the London
premiere of his latest plays to excoriate writers on the other
side of the pond:
We are small writers in America these days, writing tiny plays about tiny ideas with two to four characters, so that we get produced and nobody loses any money. American playwrights have been workshopped and "staged-readinged" to death, and we are now a fearful bunch who add sitcom lines to our dramas and tie things up at the end so that folks can walk out of theatres smiling. We watch the studios make films about Iraq that don't sell tickets and we steer clear of the subject. A young American writer like Christopher Shinn, whose plays Where Do We Live (2002) and Dying City (2006) explored the impact of 9/11 and the Iraq war, doesn't shy away from politics, but there are few others. Wallace Shawn, the most underrated playwright in America, quietly keeps questioning the way we live, but in infrequent bursts; and next week David Mamet opens a new play on Broadway about an American president (fingers crossed it will be good). So there are sparks of fire out there on the horizon, but not enough. Maybe every writer has a political play hidden away in a drawer somewhere, but my guess is that we've stopped writing them. Pilot scripts are a lot shorter and easier to hustle.
While I yield to no one in my admiration for the British playwrights that he lists in his first paragraph -- and for Messrs. Shinn and Shawn, if not Mr. Mamet -- I sense more smoke than fire here, since the list of American playwrights he admires grows just as long as those of British extraction by the end of his essay. (And, to be fair to LaBute, he includes himself in the ranks of the American writers he excoriates as well.) After saying that he "can still count on a playwright like David Hare or Caryl Churchill to give a shit" (really? The Year of Magical Thinking director David Hare?), he promises, each time he sits down at his desk, "to write about a subject of some importance, and to do so with honesty and courage. The time for fear and complacency is past. Bravery needs to make a comeback on both sides of the footlights, and fast." More from the Gen. George Patton of the American theatre here. Consider your shit given, Mr. LaBute.
Posted at 2.17 pm in /Miscellaneous
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Tuesday, 15 January 2008
This Place Is a Desert. Conceived and directed by Jay Scheib. Produced by Shoshana Polanco. Scenic and lighting design by Peter Ksander. Sound and video design by Leah Gelpe. Costume design by Oana Botez-Ban. Camera by Karl Allen. With performances by Sarita Choudhury (Jeanette), Caleb Hammond (Bill Faulkner/Mr. Rowe), Thomas Keating (Jim Floyd), Aimée Phelan-Deconinck (Victorovna), Jorge Albert Rubio (Marcello), Eric Dean Scott (Richard Harris), Tanya Selvaratnam (Nurse/Mrs. Rowe), April Sweeney (Monica) and Karl Allen (Glenn "Haskell Wexler" Chick). A production of the Under the Radar festival. Running time: 100 minutes, no intermission. Reviewed at the 13 January 2008 performance. At The Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, New York, 9-20 January 2008. Ticket and schedule information at The Public Theater Web site.
Something's missing from Jay Scheib's elegant but unconvincing meditation on modern alienation
Trapped between a camera and a hard place:
This Place Is a Desert
(Photo: Julien Jourdes)
The three couples and their associated lovers in This Place Is a Desert express their bitterness, loneliness and desire exclusively through their bodies. The sound that echoes most through the Public Theater's cavernous LuEsther Hall during Jay Scheib's meditation on the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, the locale transferred to the post-capitalist multi-ethnic United States, is the inimitable smack of flesh pounding into flesh, and its most memorable visual trope is the presence of male and female bodies in various states of elegant, posed deshabille. As they change partners, express affection and even engage in a most unpleasant-looking orgy through the nearly two-hour running time, though, their entrapment in their surroundings (and in the frame of the camera) begins to seem beyond the insights of the characters, and, unfortunately, beyond the conception of the work.
For even a theatre primarily of movement and images requires some kind of exploratory if implicit objective correlative, a way into what lies beneath the dynamics of the movement and images. Even so, there is narrative of a sort here. The marriage of writer Marcello (the artist figure) and Jeanette is fraying at the edges, not least because of his illicit liaison with the disaffected Victorovna; nuclear-power consultant Jim Floyd copes with his disturbingly unpredictable wife Monica; high-powered moneyman Mr. Rowe treats his relationship with his wife and those around him with all the crudity of cold hard cash. The physical confines of the boxy interiors in which these characters have been condemned to live their lives is paralleled by the entrapment of their facial features in the camera's frame. Love may or may not be possible. But then ... what?
The uncredited text and dialogue may underscore the entrapment of these characters linguistically as well: they speak, when they do, in a series of clichés. The prosaic quality of these dialogues rarely calls attention to itself, but one wishes that it would, especially from writer Marcello (and there's little indication here as to whether he's a good writer or not; he's a good friend with a dying character named "Bill Faulkner," but acquaintance doesn't necessarily breed talent, and the little pieces we get of his prose are about as unenergetic and colorless as the clichés that Jeanette and Victorovna trade when they finally meet at the end of the play -- indeed, one wishes that they'd drop the predictable, melodramatic dialogue and start smacking each other around instead; everybody else has been smacked around, after all).
That said, the cast and the design team (Peter Ksander, Leah Gelpe, Oana Botez-Ban) contribute brilliantly to the production, ever-watchable and dynamic, and Scheib remains one of the most sensuous, haunted young directors of the time. But the production fails to become more than the sum of its parts. And perhaps it's those elements of Antonioni's films that Scheib omits from his piece that lead to my dissatisfaction. Antonioni framed his characters not only in rooms, but also in natural landscapes, and while that can't be done given the confines of the theatrical form in which he works, Scheib doesn't really find a counter-valence for his interiors that exteriors represented for Antonioni. (The intimacy and invasiveness of the video camera mimics Antonioni's intimacy and invasiveness, but here too, little is added that video-in-theatre hasn't already explored, sometimes ad nauseam.)
And, though one hates to say it (and risks, admittedly, the charge of playing the age card), perhaps the fault here is the rawness of youth: there's not that reluctant, torturous resignation regarding the ennui in the modern world that comes with long experience. This Place Is a Desert has got the elegance right, and the sensuality, and the luxury, and the transitoriness of modern interior furniture, but not the ambivalence of that world's dark heart. At the end of This Place Is a Desert, Marcello and Jeanette step downstage, out of the boxy set, and only begin to communicate then. But in Antonioni's world (and indeed in the modern world), there's no downstage, conveniently situated outside of the boxes and traps of the set. Here, it seems a bit of a cheat. Resignation to surroundings and the objects within them is not only inevitable, but necessary: hence its tragedy, as the closing montage of L'Eclisse suggests.
I was reminded here particularly not of an Antonioni film but of Roberto Rossellini's 1953 film Voyage in Italy, a profound influence on Antonioni's work and a masterpiece of sorts that remains unavailable on DVD in the United States as yet. That film too detailed the dissolution of a marriage within a modern world that, first, holds no beauty and, second, numbs our capacity for the recognising the beauty of other individuals, experiences and worlds. George Sanders, the victim of this existence, is the very model of a desiccated elegance bored and smothered by ennui -- he is dead inside. But even he gets his moment of love, however fleeting, from Ingrid Bergman. It's that possibility that remains in the modern world; perhaps its recognition comes only with time, and years.
Posted at 8.58 am in /Notices
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