Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
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Sunday, 10 February 2008
The Cenci by Antonin Artaud. Directed, conceived and adapted by John Jahnke, from a new translation by Richard Sieburth. Set design: Peter Ksander. Sound design: Kristin Worrall. Light design: Miranda K. Hardy. Costume design: Ramona Ponce. Choreography: Benjamin Asriel. With Anthony Torn (Cenci), Lauren Blumenfeld (Beatrice), Anna Fitzwater (Lucretia), Kobi Libii (Giacomo), Alexander Paul Nifong (Bernardo), Mauricio Tafur Salgado (Orsino), Todd D'Amour (Camillo), Joshua Seidner (Andrea), Tanisha Thompson (Assassin #1 [Olimpia]) and Alexander Lane (Assassin #2 [Marzio]). Running time: 75 minutes. A production of The Hotel Savant at the Ohio Theatre, 66 Wooster Street. Reviewed at the 8 February performance. 6-23 February 2008. Ticket and schedule information at Theatermania.
Uneven casting weakens a curiously uninvolving production of Artaud's only complete stageplay
Taking a chance:
Members of the cast of
Hotel Savant's The Cenci
I confess that I've always been skeptical of the Artaudian project; though without Antonin Artaud we'd have had neither Jerzy Grotowski nor the Living Theatre, the essays and manifestoes that make up his classic 1938 The Theatre and Its Double, read in the cold light of day rather than the fevered darkness of the shadows, strike one as poetic, even inspirational, but hardly a firm basis for a new theatre practice. His calls (clichéd by now; they're more than seventy years old, much older than Stanislavsky's and Brecht's practices were when Artaud was writing) of "No More Masterpieces" and to the need for the performer to "signal through the flames" seem more suited to protest placards than as a basis for rehearsal room exercises. Artaud's own dramatic and performance work as it has come down to us remains available for reading (there once was a sound recording of this on the Internet, but I can't seem to track it down).
And through the text of his sole complete stageplay, of course, The Cenci from 1935, which John Jahnke's Hotel Savant is staging in a new translation through 23 February. As Mark Blankenship notes in his feature article on the production for the New York Times, the play is worth a revival for its curiosity value alone. While Susan Sontag said that Artaud's Cenci was "not a very good play," Jahnke in the same article begs to differ: "Is it a flawed piece? Absolutely. But does that detract from the fact that it's exciting onstage? No, not at all." Despite all the efforts of Jahnke, his inspired design team and his cast, however, the evidence here is that it's not very exciting onstage at all.
Based on Shelley's 1819 drama, the story concerns the grotesque maneuverings of the Cenci family in 1599 Rome; it's easy to see Artaud's attraction to the story, the tale of a perverse patriarch and his dealings with both his family and the Papacy. It's a grand guignol in many ways, filled with rapes and bloody deaths, and it calls for the heightened language and wild action of the Jacobean tragedy, which it most closely resembles in form. It calls, too, for that calculated, disciplined excess in both language and production to fully engage the performers and audience in the events of the play.
Finally, it's that excess that's lacking here, and lacking that excess the play and production are uninvolving. Peter Ksander contributes a maze-like, often anachronistic set (Cenci dictates into a tape recorder, and telephones play a significant part of the communications matrix of the production), imaginatively lit by both flourescent and incandescent instruments by Miranda Hardy, which, spread across the wide Ohio Theatre space, provides a broad chiaroscuro environment reminisicent of Italian historical painting. Perhaps it's that distance that swallows the possibility of engagement; the mazes trap the performers as well as the characters. On occasion, the production reaches heights which demonstrate its potential, especially in an elegantly choreographed (by Benjamin Asriel) banquet/orgy scene: no maze needed here for the presentation of perverse manners. Though Anthony Torn as Cenci and Todd D'Amour as Camillo throw their energies full-throttle into the violent events of the play and so are the greatest successes in the ten-person cast, the remainder seem oddly uninvolved. Lauren Blumenfeld has excellent moments as Beatrice, but at times she seems to oscillate between fear and terror (appropriate to Artaud) and mere petulance (which is not).
That said, I can't blame Ms. Blumenfeld or the rest of the cast; much of the fault must lie, as I've mentioned, with the script. Artaud's weak text lacks the pounding rush of violent lyricism that sustains the work of Marlowe or even Shakespeare in plays like Antony and Cleopatra and Troilus and Cressida, and this has the effect of undermining the Theatre of Cruelty tropes that Jahnke bases his production upon. Ironically, a performance practice like this seems to need a masterpiece, a text equal to the passions that the bodied performers hope to demonstrate. You get the idea that these performers and characters lack a language equal to their actions, and rather than releasing bodied passions, this lack constitutes a repression, a missing element: the body needs language to elicit and limn the suffering that lies within, to make it theatrically communicable.
Artaud hoped to threaten quotidian, dead composure in his theatre; through the evocation of ecstatic suffering, he hoped to reawaken a part of the human spirit that rationalism had rendered dormant. Both Grotowski and the Becks then and Jan Fabre and Howard Barker now continue that project; perhaps it's time to say that we've moved beyond Artaud, to wonder if there remains any "there" there, that the creation of new texts appropriate for his example is our current need. But The Cenci doesn't threaten that composure, and the evocation remains wan. There is a program note, "There will be smoking on stage in one short scene," that seems to encapsulate the deepest flaw of the project; if second-hand smoke is all there is to be worried about, if that's the main threat to our composure, then the work remains to be done.
Posted at 10.53 am in /Notices
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