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Sunday, 22 March 2009
Venice
Saved: A Seminar by David Levine & CiNE. Conceived and
directed by David Levine, incorporating an unfinished play by Simone Weil
adapted by Gordon Dahlquist. With Jeff Biehl, James Hannaham, Jon Krupp,
Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Christianna Nelson, Colleen Werthmann and David
Levine. Running time (at the performance I saw, though really it's up to
you): 3 hours and 15 minutes, one intermission. At Performance Space 122, 150
First Avenue at East 9th Street. Reviewed at the 21 March performance.
Runs 21 March-5 April 2009. Ticket and schedule information at TheaterMania.
David Levine's wry, witty and subversive metatheatrical take on
political theatre may be the most delightful – and most relevant
– piece of political theatre of the season
In The Lesson, Eugene Ionesco subjects the teacher-pupil
relationship to a caustic absurdist examination: a language tutorial which
begins with benign intentions slowly reveals the sexual and political
ideologies that underlie the educational experience to depict the
most malignant autopsy of power relations. That's not what David Levine
and his CiNE co-conspirators at Venice Saved: A Seminar are
after – no knives are produced, although at some performances some
metaphorical knives are bound to make their appearance – but the
entire evening plays with and examines the basis of "political theatre,"
especially in the context of political education and discussion,
raising questions of power and authority in the theatre and the
classroom. And it's a discussion which, properly, you take home with
you.
In a way, I have to ask my fellow bloggers (who like nothing more than
to hear themselves talking, or at any rate read themselves writing): where
were you? Because here, in a piece of theatre determined to have a
political edge in a post-Obama America, you've got a chance to say
your piece in a theatre. And it's dense, multilayered and delightfully
comic theatre too. The audience gathers around a seminar table that
encircles a playing area, and at the outset, the genial David Levine and
his performers offer a primary text for examination: Simone Weil's
unfinished play Venice Saved, a dreadful piece of work about a
Spanish conspiracy to destroy the Venetian Republic in the 17th century.
Written in 1940 as Weil and her family were fleeing the Nazi occupation of
Paris, the play is performed in bits and pieces as Levine and the other
performers, also seated around the seminar table, demonstrate some common
assumptions about political theatre, all the while providing biographical
and aesthetic "context" in the form of contributions from dramaturgs and
other performers.
But then, based upon the way the conversation is going, things begin to
get seriously out-of-hand. A comment about the relevance of
historical material to a contemporary political world gives rise to the
performance of an "updated" scene from the play, set in a shipping
container in 21st-century New York City populated by two
revolutionaries and a whore. A comment upon the formal qualities of Weil's
rather pedestrian play is met with a staging of a scene from the play in
the style of Black Watch. And weaving between these scenes is a
conversation in which the audience is urged to take part: a democracy it
seems, but always under the guiding eye of director Levine, the
ultimate "authority" in this quasi-republic of the theatre, who can
easily guide the discussion down predetermined channels as he sees
fit.
Given the play itself and its author, several questions are bound to
arise: Weil's status as a possibly "anorexic" single Jewish woman with a
pretense to Catholicism, not to mention her status as a writer and fighter
in the Spanish Civil War; the French theatre during the war years, hung
between Cocteau and Sartre's 1944 No Exit; the role of the "public
intellectual." But ultimately, Venice Saved: A Seminar becomes less
and less about Weil and her play and more and more about the political and
aesthetic presumptions of the audience gathered around the table. The
educational process is in some respects an attempt to seek answers to
questions, but there's no final answer to the questions that Levine and
his collaborators seek to raise: What is political theatre? Is theatre
itself a form that undermines any attempt at instrumental political
action? So far as a director and his performers impose explicit or
implicit political interpretations upon a drama in performance, does an
individual audience member not do the same thing from their position in
the auditorium? And how open are we to questioning those presumptions,
especially when goaded to do so as passive recipients of a theatrical
experience?
In Venice Saved: A Seminar, however, the recipients are not so
passive: instead, they are encouraged to contribute to the explicit
interpretation of the work. While this is audience participation with a
vengeance, it's also a skilfully crafted means of encouraging debate, even
if director Levine, the leader of the seminar, directs this debate down
predetermined avenues. And the "quality" (an ideologically determined word
itself) of any given performance is based upon the quality of the audience
and their willingness to participate, to engage – this too an aspect
of "political theatre" open to question. At the performance I attended, I
played a minor supporting role in the show, along with a playwright from
Melbourne, New York director Ken Rus Schmoll, actor Matthew Maher and most
memorably PS122's artistic director Vallejo Gantner himself (who saw his
own institution subjected to comic political criticism in one of the
scenes that parodied Weil's play).
Of course, as Levine would say, all this is subject to
cultural contextualization too: a bunch of fairly well-off
middle-class Americans (racially mixed, but with a decided skew
towards a Caucasian population; and to be fair, a few Australians as well)
debating the relevance or irrelevance of
political theatre in a small black box in New York's East Village, trying
to come to terms with both 17th-century Venice and 21st-century
Israel and what they might mean to us. The political result of Venice
Saved: A Seminar? Probably nothing. Unless, of course, you can measure
results by the engagement of individual audience members in thinking about
theatre and, by extension, the culture in which they find themselves. In
that event, Venice Saved: A Seminar is a smashing success. If you
need a dose of political theatre, I'm sorry to say that tickets to next
week's readings of Seven Jewish Children at the New York Theatre
Workshop, a few short blocks from PS122, are very hard to get. But you
might be better served by Venice Saved: A Seminar. In the
"gift bag" given to each audience member, there's a copy of Churchill's
play anyway. If you're feeling really radical, you can always lead a
reading of the play yourself at a performance of Venice Saved.
Subversive, surely, especially if you don't ask for a donation to Medical
Aid for Palestinians at the end of it. Though in the context of Venice
Saved, all's fair. (And to whet your appetite, enjoy a few clips of a
workshop production of Venice Saved at the CiNE Web site here.)
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