Under the Radar: "Generation Jeans," "Terminus," "Disinformation"

- Generation Jeans
Photo/Natalia Koliada

If Nikolai Khalezin were to perform Generation Jeans in his home country of Belarus, in a public theater, he'd be thrown in jail as a "political," given the silver scoop of a spoon (the whole spoon might be used to commit murder, as if, Nikolai observes, a wall wouldn't do just as well), and confined to cramped quarters during his imprisonment. But he performs anyway, secretly, in private apartments, because he is a jean-wearing freedom fighter, and though it is dangerous to shout "I am free" when the black club of a policeman is swinging toward ones face, it is a phrase he knows must be said.

With so much weighty relevance behind it, Generation Jeans doesn't need to be very theatrical, and the majority of the show is simply Nikolai sitting on a high stool, speaking directly to us. It works, because Nikolai's lack of refinement speaks toward a greater honesty; he is one of those rare performers not trying to dazzle us, but simply trying to speak what must be said, in the only way he knows. That said, it is somewhat odd to see a DJ on stage with him (Lavr Berzhanin, a k a DJ Laurel), especially since the samples of music used are mostly electronic beats that don't tie into Nikolai's biographical tale of growing up craving AC/DC or The Sex Pistols. But even this device generally works: Nikolai speaks so plainly, without exaggeration or the all-too-common frenzy or caricature of solo performers, that his text keeps the music in the background, allowing it to filter through only for a meditative emphasis, which it successfully does for two of the key moments of tragic catharsis.

For a show that is for the most part performed so plainly (it even remains in the original language, with subtitles to guide us), Generation Jeans still manages to wake us up to the power of imagination, especially as Nikolai stands on stage, his arms wrapped around the flimsy bars of a representative cage, quietly envisioning verdant, emerald green meadows, or the noisy but wide open, sunset streaked runway of La Guardia Airport, thinking of anything, everything, that will help him continue on.

- Terminus

Photo/Ros Kavanagh

If it weren't for Mark O'Rowe's clever verse (e.g., smitten/admitten, invective/ineffective, identical/antithetical) and graphic language, it would've been hard to sit through his ninety minute triptych of monologues, Terminus. Harder still given the taste of thick smoke in the air and the dim and sideways illuminated sight of the actors on stage. But the language justifies the appearance of demons (composed of worms), easy-going psychopaths, and matter-of-fact violence by elevating it to the metaphor of poetry. Though I'm not sure there's a hidden meaning to a man swinging from a crane by his entrails with a demons barbed tail sticking out of his mouth as he sings "Wind Beneath My Wings," it seems not only plausible in O'Rowe's world, but oddly humorous, too, an impressive feat for such a dark piece. (It brings to mind similarly glamorous works of violence, like The Lieutenant of Inishmore.)

Watching Terminus is much like looking at one's own reflection through a broken mirror, which is why Jon Bausor's set -- a shattered pane, with the actors each standing on and beneath large slivers of glass -- is so effective. While the darker schisms of the play are hopefully not a part of our souls, the basic characters are: Andrea Irvine, for instance, plays a counselor who only takes up violence after she is much abused by a violent girl named Celine, and the only sin of Eileen Walsh's character is that she so badly wants a man that she loses herself, literally, for one. As for the mass-murderer, he is played so glibly by Aidan Kelly (think of Ciaran Hinds's performance in The Seafarer as Mr. Lockhart), that we actually sympathize with a shyness so overwhelming that it leads him to constant crime. These performances, given without a trace of poetic showmanship, are what ultimately ground the fantasies of the show, and while the ending isn't exactly the blast of white revelatory redemption that's foreshadowed, it is a satisfying close to one heck of a ride.

- Disinformation

There isn't a person out there who will leave Disinformation saying anything negative about Reggie Watts's voice: the man is an aural artist, capable of many octave-spanning notes, and that's without the assistance of his voice modulators and track-recorders, two twinned devices that let him layer distortions upon distortions upon himself. However, this show seems more like a sampler of what he can do than a statement of anything worth saying, and one of his faux-corporate slogans rings a little too close to home: "The More That You Use, The Less That You Are."

That said, there isn't a person going to Disinformation who won't be amused. From his satirical intellectualizing (his stuffy accents are enjoyable) to his retro film clips, Reggie Watts really knows how to pick his words carefully (even at their most vulgar, his "Shit Fuck Sandwich" rap is still eerily specific). It's not clear where a heart-to-heart between son and father comes in, but his mispronunciation of words like "Swiss" and "balcony" ("swize" and "balconey") is funny, as is his description of a gay night club: "It was so club. There was a floor, a ceiling, and some sort of thing that keeps those two apart." For that matter, so is his constant deadpan, a tact emphasized by his office casual look, and his too-small tie, or simply the way he unapologetically asserts himself: "Whether you're a man or a woman, or simply a man." It's nonsense, but a nonsense that we can enjoy.

Whether providing sound effects for Amy O'Neal's dancing or warbling alongside Orianna Herman, his sheer ability will always ensure he has an audience. But whether or not Reggie Watts can actually use his myriad talents to tell a story, as The Suicide Kings have with their spoken word drama, In Spite of Everything, or if he's content to just play around with short skits in various forms of mixed media . . . that's entirely up to him.

Under the Radar: "This Place is a Desert," "In Spite of Everything," "Low: Meditations Trilogy," and "Regurgitophagy"

- This Place is a Desert

Photo/Hayden Taylor

"We can talk about love and all the ways it wraps itself around us until it's just another form of suffocation," cries one of the many characters caught up in the pains and pangs of Jay Scheib's This Place is a Desert. And that's exactly what happens: a series of tight and interconnected rooms give way to a tangled snarl of relationships that overlap and clash like human hurricanes. Furthermore, a series of cameras and a passive observer (Kenneth Roraback) air the real time scenes from multiple angles, catching each character's reactions like windows to the soul, a creative use of multimedia that allows for poetic, image-heavy transitions.

As the men and women fling wildly from partner to partner, the locations become just as interchangeable, with borders as porous as the chambers of the heart. A large tan bedroom, with an illusory mirror wall, serves as the home for the couples: Jeanette and Marcello, Mr. and Mrs. Rowe, and Jim and Monica. A pale blue hallway provides the path for all the additional romances -- between Marcello and Victorovna, Monica and Richard Harris -- as does a dark red room that serves both as a place for Jeanette and Mr. Rowe, and as an orgiastic guest room.

The play does a fairly good job of depicting what happens to relationships that outlast the love, and the lingering gaze of the camera, always watching for just a little too long, helps to cement that effect. Unfortunately, the cinematic elements hollow out the stage action (which could be called a metaphor for love, but a dissatisfying excuse, if that), and after mechanical blocking, melodramatic lines delivered to the camera, and a body poetics that is anything but natural, it becomes hard to take some of the actors seriously. Caleb Hammond, for instance, would make a fantastic, egocentric drunk as Mr. Rowe, if he hadn't already played the deathbed flirtations of Bill Faulkner the same way.

Luckily, the play ends on exactly the right note, the pinnacle of anti-romance and modern love: Victornovna (the fantastic Aimee Phelan-Deconinck) pleads with Marcello (Jorge Albert Rubio, who grows more and more into the role as the show continues): "Please. Please, say you don't love me." "No," he replies, digging into her, the two burying, suffocating their heads within each other's bodies. "No. I won't say it."

- In Spite of Everything

Photo/Caroline Harvey

In Spite of Everything is the best use of spoken word that I've seen in a play yet; an urban yet arty mix of Laramie-like exploration and poetic imagination that divorces itself from reality even as it plunges itself back in, deeper, through brilliant metaphor. Only The Suicide Kings (Rupert Estanislao, Jaime DeWolf, and Geoff Trenchard) know how much of their story is true, but it hardly matters: whether it's a poem about getting fed up in the service industry, dealing with acne, or watching Columbine in reverse, there isn't a verse that isn't relevant, not a thought that someone in the audience won't agree with.

The play opens with The Suicide Kings introducing themselves to an ordinary class in an ordinary American town and then launching into a writer's workshop called "I feel a scream coming in." Unfortunately for them, the next day, 27 kids are dead, and detectives, having found a journal at the scene of the crime, are breathing down Rupert, Jamie, and Geoff's necks, demanding to know what they said to the kid that might have finally made him snap. As they alternate roles between their own self-effacing, honest poetry for the "classroom," as detectives grilling members of the group, or simply giving testimony from the killer's friend, father, and classmates, they are pursued by Sam Bass's slashes of the cello, a musical drive that demands that the void to be filled with words.

And fill it, they do. Segments from their past (fact or fiction?) show us Rupert's initiation into an Asian sect of the Crypts, Jaime as a bullied and Goth-like teenager, and Geoff as a once-violent child, and for all of them, their escape is through the language that gave them a second chance. The show vibrates with these lively verses, poetry that ignores barriers of form or canonized style to take back a disenfranchised street grammar, and the play hums with such powerful lines that I'd have to quote the whole script to do it justice. Grab your pen and paper, or razor and wrist, whatever your medium (their line, not mine), and see In Spite of Everything, for it wasn't talking that made this fictional kid snap; it was his silence.

- Low: Meditations Trilogy Part 1
Photo/Jean Jacques Tiziou

Low opens with a blank slate: an empty chair on one of those white-floored and white-walled setups most familiar from a modeling session or an Apple commercial. What follows is, if you will permit the pun, a monologued bit of white-box theater, a tale from Rha Goddess about Loquitia, a precocious girl who thinks that her teacher is racist to associate Langston Hughes with predecessor Walt Whitman, but young enough to still get into food fights with her sister. These endearing moments carry the show for the first fifteen minutes; Mrs. Goddess gets a high modulation in her pitch to sound purposefully cute, and her free movements around the space give her both attitude and grace.

That's just the prologue: Low is subsequently diagnosed with being depressed, and when she stops taking her medication (so that she can get back to the rapping she yearns to be a part of), she ends up losing even her shitty Starbucks job and moving into the streets to make her own way, a way that ultimately has her giving blow jobs to a McDonald's manager, just so that she can use the bathroom. Her humiliation doesn't end there -- she starts to get physical side-effects that involve uncontrollable spasms and tics, and though she still has sense enough to make fun of the other homeless people, she doesn't realize how far gone she's becoming.

Rha Goddess doesn't seem to notice how far gone her play is either; she's so caught up in preserving the physicality of the character that we get very little of the actual emotion, beyond that which we create from our own fears and automatic empathies. Low wants to be a rapper, but we only ever see her jumping about lip syncing to other rapper's words, which locks us out from Low's inner voice, leaving us only with cold observations. And though Low is forced to endure much humiliation, you'd never be able to tell that from Rha's performance: the words tell us one thing, but her poise tells us another, and while I understand pride, what happens on stage is more a means to armor herself. Where the play finally connects is during a personal epilogue (Rha herself, or as Ana, Low's sister, it isn't clear) that at last allows us to see Low as another person does.

Meditations is an accurate description of this trilogy, for if the first part is any indication, these characters are all internalized and thought out, rather than experienced. Chay Yew has done an excellent job of casting cages of light on the floor, and moving his actor across the stage, but it's up to Rha to show us something more. Right now, Low is just talk, and it's nothing we haven't heard before.

- Regurgitophagy

Photo/Debora 70

I'm sure that Michel Melamed's Regurgitophagy is a great stream-of-consciousness play: I say this because it's one of my fundamental beliefs that you should always give a man who is electrocuting himself the benefit of the doubt. But what I saw on the stage was a man desperately trying to communicate something to the audience about consciousness, and what I saw in the audience were a bunch of disbelieving onlookers trying not to laugh. You see, Melamed uses a system he calls "Pau-de-Arara" to directly interface with the audience; electric clamps are attached to his body so that when we make noise of any kind, he gets shocked. Some of Melamed's jokes simply aren't funny, or they haven't translated properly from Brazil to America, but for the great majority of the time, puzzled people were trying to figure out whether or not respond to his questions, whether or not they should laugh, and best of all, whether or not it would be alright to applaud the man.

Honestly, I wanted to clap just to hurt him; after all, it's not my fault he hooked himself up to a machine like that, nor is it my fault that his text hasn't yet translated well into English. But I have another policy, too, and that's not to do anything to an artist that I wouldn't have done to me, and when he offered to show the audience that the shocks were not fake, I didn't exactly leap at the opportunity. (For what it's worth, there was plenty of noise the machine did not pick up on, and plenty of times that the machine was turned off, so the show is still more about the gimmick than his actual point.)

In any case, when Melamed read in his own language toward the end of the show, he sounded clear, strong, and confident. And when he recited off strings of three letter words toward the beginning, I started to understand the way in which nonsense could be turned into sense. But until he resolves the language barrier, American audiences are just paying to watch a man electrically flagellate himself, and that's not my idea of theater.

Under the Radar: "Church" and "Poetics: A Ballet Brut"

- Church

Photo/Ryan Jensen

For the most part, Young Jean Lee's Church, a quiet exploration of the power of faith, avoids the pontification that she declaims early on as "masturbation rage." Instead of focusing on anything negative, she opens with a voice calling out from the darkness, then introduces us to four ordinary people, Reverends Jose (Brian Bickerstaff), Weena (Weena Pauly), Katie (Katie Workum), and Katy (Katy Pyle), who each deliver a sermon asking simply for our prayers to help them (and us) through the most understandable of troubles in our lives: the tendency to whine, for instance. The play then moves into a series of absurd testimonials which, because they are delivered straightly, without satire and with tenderness, give us a touchstone for why some people are able to believe, and why others are not.

In this case, surely no-one in the audience shares the circumstances of Weena's deliverance -- ten years of orgies, drug-use, abortions made into trophies on the wall, relaxation atop ten gushing feet of chicken blood, or the erstwhile tattooing of a swastika onto one's face -- her unabashed recollection speaks to some underlying grace. Likewise with Jose's attempts to sermonize -- it doesn't matter that his parables turn themselves, half-finished, into other parables, much like his hysterical references to "birds made of fish" or of demon mummies (including, but not restricted to, unicorns). Ultimately, the play concludes with two surges of music -- the first, a rapturous dance that, all smiles and energies, gives the sensation of beauteous freedom, and the second, a large choral rendition of "Ain't Got Time To Die" that reminds us that every voice has the power not only to sing, but to come together. I'm not a religious man, but Lee's Church gives me hope that there is something that unites us all, some inner inexpressible goodness, even if it's not religion itself.

- Poetics: A Ballet Brut

Photo/Peter Nigrini

They may not be from Oklahoma, but if Nature Theater of Oklahoma's recent works prove anything, it's that they understands nature: human nature. Just as No Dice exaggerated our casual conversations through the veil of dinner theater, Poetics takes our ordinary movements and filters them through a dream ballet. They dress like hip twentysomethings, all colorful sneakers, funny socks, and graphic Ts; and they act like us -- sipping on a soda, crossing their arms behind their head or placing their hands in their pockets, basically trying to find a way to idle comfortably on a narrow swath of space between the audience and a looming red curtain. And when these movements start coming together in sync, as "All By Myself" starts playing, they dance like us too, or like those of us who don't know how to dance would dance (or have danced: like children, unfettered by form, unrestricted by rules).

As the curtains part, the space changes -- growing from the backstage audience area to the stage itself and eventually the entire theater -- as does the dancing: though many of the gestures are repetitive, they way they look changes based on the song (from "You Should Be Dancing" to "Dancing Queen" to "Dream Weaver"). Sometimes ballet twirls are accomplished with the use of spinning office chairs with complex steps done by dancing fingers on the floor; the show is a combination of grace and sloppiness (as when they dance while eating pizza), and becomes a brute force approach to dance. Simple movements that, out of context, would not be dance, are now, through persistence and choreography, a part of a new vocabulary of motion.

At its heart, however, Poetics is -- like Church -- a reminder of the ties that bind us all. Music and dance are two other artistic forces whose effects cannot be easily described, but which have the power to make us all move. So get up off of that dance floor, kill me softly with that song, because we can dance if we want to, and you don't stop till you get it up.

Preview: COIL Festival (at PS122)

Completing the powerful trifecta of downtown theater festivals this week (The Public's Under the Radar Festival, and HERE's Culturemart 2008) is PS122's celebration of past, present, and future works, with returning hits like the TEAM's Particularly in the Heartland (they'll be back in the fall with the US premiere of Architecting), current works like Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, and upcoming works like Iodine (YOD). The works are mostly mixed affairs that incorporate music (like Banana Bag & Bodice's punk extravaganza The Fall and Rise of the Rising Fallen), cabaret (C'est Duckie!), and dance (Beethoven Live), and, with a variety of showings from 3:00 to 10:30 every day through Tuesday, January 15th, is a great opportunity both for the artists and the audiences to get exposed.

On Thursday, January 10th, I finally got a chance to see Banana Bag & Bodice and the TEAM:

- The Fall and Rise of the Rising Fallen

Photo/Ryan Jensen

The Rising Fallen are a musty basement living room, all jam-packed drum kit, keyboard/table, impromptu soda cooler, bass and lead guitars, and a sextet of punk-clad artists with blood pressures of 278/130. The Rising Fallen are everything, which is everything. The Rising Fallen once toured the oil rig circuit, by which they mean an oil rig, where they were stuck for six months (due to weather), forced to give blow jobs, sit in a cage surrounded by steam and oil, and have their women model in a 'high concept area,' bare-breasted, for visiting Japanese execs. The Rising Fallen are more than happy to turn your frown inside-up. Don't you dare ask what any of that means: lead singer Francoise Kelly (Peter Blomquist) would have you "let it all just spin out and then look back at it"; bassist Jacko (Jason Craig) would try to find the unity in the space, a human feng shui; and enthusiastic tambouriner Ada (Heather Peroni) would just like to ride the wave, 'cause you know, on a missionary mission, you often have to do things.

The result smashes between the recent rock musical 33 to Nothing and the insane performances of The Best (OEDIrx), and is really only recommended for those who like their music to physically hurt a little. Not that Banana Bag & Bodice play badly (considering they taught themselves the instruments just for this show), but their nonsense songs are satirically unclear ("And I tried to turn a monkey into a bee/and I lied when I wrote the wrong history"), and Blomquist's deep, yet somehow shrill, delivery is wearying (which may explain why Francoise recoils from the microphone as if he's being electrocuted during each song, and collapses after he finishes). It's an energetic mind-fuck, and the addition of Mary Archias to the show (as a "fan" who replaces -- literally -- the gay "bells & whistler" Westie, as the original actor is on vacation) gives us a conduit to their insanity, but the show could use a little insulation to ground us.

- Particularly In the Heartland

What is America, when we have such divisive terms as "the heartland" (in this case, Lebanon, Kansas, the physical center of the US)? That's what The TEAM (Theatre of the Emerging American Movement) have set out to explore, by way of the Christian youngsters of the Springer family, who believe their family to have been Raptured away in the aftermath of a brutal storm, and three visitors in their post-apocalyptic world of rediscovery: Tracy Jo (Jill Frutkin), who claims to be an alien; Dorothy (Jessica Almasy), a typical New York businesswoman who falls from a plane back down to plain old Earth; and Robert F. Kennedy (Jake Margolin). Yes, that one.

Rachel Chavkin keeps us from asking questions by painting clear pictures that often surprise us with their delicate physicality; she also involves the audience by having them sing The Battle Hymn of the Republic (whose later verses, if you've forgotten, have lines like "He is sifting out the hearts of men/Before His judgment seat"), breaking the wall with an improvised mid-show Q&A, and a few other directorial tricks. Some of this is misdirection that stretches portions of the piece out needlessly, but other devices, like the use of a bag of leaves and a bag of white powder to bring about autumn and winter, or the physical representation of Kennedy's assassination by means of a ladder and a rope -- those have an immediate pay out.

The heart of the play stems from watching the relationships bloom over the seven years between the first "Rapture" and the second judgment, and the best moments of the piece are the tender montages that overlap a series of independent actions into a united whole. The TEAM also gives another good example of why developmental theater companies are so important: there are layers upon layers of emotion between these actors, which is why their storytelling can be so fluid and clear, even when there are no words: eldest daughter Sarah (Libby King) finally working up the guts to kiss Tracy; ten-year-old Anna (Kristen Sieh) finally pushing past her childishness to take on some consequences; disaffected Todd (Frank Boyd) finally showing the chinks in his armor when he enlists for the military -- and, best of all, the million little looks and slight touches that bring Dorothy and Robert together, along with the Springers, as a real melting pot of an American family.

Preview: Culturemart 2008 (at HERE Arts Center)

What's your New Year's Resolution? For me, it's to see more shows than ever, and I can't think of a better way to get exposure to the rapidly evolving, hybrid theater out there, than to check out HERE Arts Center's CULTUREMART 2008, a work-in-progress showcase of what their resident artists have been up to, along with the Under the Radar Festival, a collection of worldwide talent curated by Mark Russell for The Public. We'll be reporting in periodically from the festival with capsule coverage, but it's highly recommended that you simply go -- both offer shows for just $15. Some personal recommendations include the new Rotozaza piece at Veselka Cafe, Etiquette, and the return of Nature Theater of Oklahoma's Poetics: A Ballet Brut, as well as the double bill of Richard Toth's Foodstable and Alexandra Beller's What Comes After Happy.

To kick things off, here's a taste of one CULTUREMART 2008 double bill: Kamala Sankaram's Miranda 5x and Sheila Callaghan's Water (or, the secret life of objects).

- Miranda 5x

Welcome to "You Bet Their Life," a game show that lets the audience judge supposed criminals, like this week's unknown murderer. To help introduce us to the suspects, jovial host Dave (Joel Marsh Garland) and his clueless cohost, Julie Faluda (Kamala Sankaram) appear in prerecorded clips to introduce live "flashback" performances between Miranda (Sankaram) and the three men suspected of killing her. These pieces are blocked simply, with Miranda standing in front of a projection of various locales that are coupled with subtitles for her operatically cryptic conversations. She's assisted by her ensemble, Squeezebox, who provide a folksy classical spin on her arias. The most promising segment from this presentation is a fast-paced staccato song in a Starbucks that keeps Sankaram out of her falsetto, and which is coupled with some frantically edited close-ups of Miranda; as the scene continues, the melody becomes a loop for Miranda's inescapable future, and Sankaram removes herself from the role to add in a layer of gasping accordion notes, this time layered over surveillance footage from the coffee shop.

- Water (or, the secret life of objects)

This should be the year of Sheila Callaghan. Not only will we see Crawl, Fade to White later this year with 13P (and two more in early '09), but Water is the opening salvo in a much longer piece that, if this is any indication, will be a series of international vignettes (in their native languages) with the common theme of water. Hence April Mattis plays a Katrina survivor, sitting, starving, on a roof, watching the press helicopters fly overhead (her thoughts literally bubble on screen behind her); Carolyn Bost and Gerardo Rodriguez play a couple from Oslo dealing with another 100-degree day; and in a series of prerecorded events, we see possible futures (in which Bloomberg is Chancellor of Saudi-America, faux fish are in, and fresh water goes for $400 a gallon) and hysterical pasts (like a retro 1985 educational video where a scientist promotes the "hard science" that disproves all the environmental alarmists). As directed by Daniella Topol, and with videos and lighting from William Cusick (the creative team from my #1 show of '05, Dead City), the play is already a heartbreaking maelstrom of interconnected thoughts, and it's already creative, most notably in the easygoing audience participation, which I wouldn't dare spoil. I'd happily get intoxicated on this Water, hyponatremia be damned.