Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Sunday, 27 April 2008
Maintaining the Simulation: Untitled Mars (This Title May Change)
Untitled Mars (This Title May Change). Conceived and directed
by Jay Scheib. Scenic design by Peter Ksander. Lighting design by Miranda
Hardy. Costume design by Oana Botez-Ban. Sound design by Catherine
McCurry. Video design by Balász Vajna and Miklós Buk.
Dramaturg/producer for Hungary: Anna Lengyel. Text assembly by Jay Scheib.
A co-
Jay Scheib's sci-
Innocent little green man (Karl Allen) meets greedy
big white man (Caleb Hammond) in Untitled Mars
(Photo:
Justin Bernhaut)
Two things about the name of Jay Scheib's new show, which closes today at PS122.
First, despite its high-
He tried to do so in This Place Is a Desert earlier this season
at Mark Russell's Under the Radar festival at the Public, but here he
skirts the risk of self-indulgence that he couldn't entirely avoid in the
earlier show. Perhaps it's the unique presence of the director himself in
Untitled Mars that's the saving comic grace; he plays "Jay Scheib,"
a mordantly skeptical theatre director doing research for the show we're
currently watching about a future manned mission to Mars. This research
takes the form of a teleconferenced conversation between Scheib and a
genial woman with the Mars Desert Research Lab. (The choppy, elliptical
nature of this Internet conversation using Skype also begs the question:
If this is the fragmented, jerky communication we have between Utah and
New York, what can we expect of the conversation between Mars and Earth,
let alone between two human beings alone in the same room?) One of the
options for this mission is, chillingly, a one-
Assuming the worst possible outcome, Untitled Mars becomes a
wild, grueling sex farce (and Scheib's sexual imagination runs free, given
the admitted lack of research as to sexual relationships and even the
possibility of childbirth in such a colony). Researcher Mannie (Natalie
Thomas in a flowing red dress, one of the multidimensionally sexy and
sexless costumes designed by the ever-impressive Oana Botez-Ban) has
already gone round the bend, induced into acute situational schizophrenia
by the
emotionless scientific perspective that the research has necessitated;
it's up to Jackie (Tanya Selvaratnam), another researcher with her own
doubts and questions about her sexuality, to find a cure for her and save
the mission itself. It doesn't help that the other two women on the
mission are the hard-edged but seductive Anne (April Sweeney), who has her
eyes set on Jackie's cynical husband Sylvere (László
Keszég); bi-
It doesn't take long to see that this landscape isn't Mars of the late
21st-
This all looks to dissolve in disastrous chaos, but Scheib can't resist offering two endings. In the first, the simulation looks to spin wildly out of control and end in dismal, painful failure. Through the self-evidently silly device of time travel (and the only real representative trope of the genre of science fiction that informs the production), Scheib offers a second, more optimistic close to the fable. In this, the rapacious businessman gets his comeuppance through the agency of a decidedly non-futuristic bow-and-arrow, and the show closes on a touching, moving and hopeful attempt at marital reconciliation.
Scheib is an amazingly prolific director – this is his third New York show in the past few years, and at the same time he's been assiduously working in Europe as well – but as his career goes on he is demonstrating the tightening focus of his vision. He is emotionally drawn to large, empty spaces (in his stagings of both Women Dreamt Horses and This Place is a Desert) which the human body desires to fill with expressions of its own violent reaches for pleasure and possession; the very American schizophrenia that lurches between utopia, possession, freedom and environmental destruction; the tenuousness of the mediated technological vision in a physically crumbling world; and, finally, the urge to the repression of human irrationality, an irrationality that can erupt in the experience of ecstasy. He is also drawn to the big mess that these tormented human beings can create both in Utah and elsewhere (not to mention the stages on which he works). Though still possessed of a bleak and tragic perspective, Untitled Mars (This Title May Change) locates a comic aspect of his vision that may provide a new territory for his own explorations.
Untitled Mars is the first installment of Simulated
Cities/
Posted at 11.33 am in /Notices
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