Three Sisters

To clarify, while Jesse Edward Rosbrow has "adapted" Chekhov's Three Sisters for Theatre of the Expendable, this review will refer to it by its gimmicky slogan--3 Sisters 6 Actors 12 Dollars. With the naturalism destroyed, the subtext discarded, and (at best) two passable actors cobbled out of the mass, it would be criminal to link this to Chekhov. One problem is most obvious in the crowded first act, in which actor Clinton Lowe mentions "There are thirteen of us at the table!" and the casual observer has no way of telling if Lowe is speaking as Kulygin, Masha's husband, or Solyony, rival to Irina's loveless dalliance with Tusenbach. (I won't bore you with the plot any more than the show does, which is to say, you'd better be familiar with these characters before seeing the show.)

Using the word "adaptation" implies that something has changed to better deal with circumstances, but putting on the show with six actors shows nothing, except for arrogance and foolhardiness. Instead, 3 Sisters 6 Actors 12 Dollars is a mutation--or, after three hours all told (including fumbled light cues, technical problems, and overlong intermissions), an abomination. The strongest bits of this play are, not surprisingly, the monologues, although these too are undercut by poor acting and poorer direction: as Olga tells her sister Irina that "people don't marry for love, they marry because they're supposed to," Morgan Anne Zipf rises from the background (where she plays Masha) and exits stage left, only to silently but distractingly re-enter as Natasha, Andrey's wife, long enough to exit stage right . . . just in time to come back as Masha again. These elements of farce have no place in Chekhov's weighty naturalism.

But Rosbrow is apparently blind to a great many things. Not only does he choose to retain some of the trivial moments of the script, but he blocks the intimate space in a way in which the actors not only turn away from the audience, but obscure their castmates, too. Act II takes place in the evening, but what starts out as an admirable attempt by Wilburn Bonnell to mimic candle and moonlight ends up turning into forty minutes of shadowacting. (This is appropriate only in the sense that the cast looks to be sparring in preparation for a show rather than actually acting it.) In Act IV (years pass between acts), Vershinin says "Life is growing brighter and easier every day," which is one of Chekhov's bitter comedies, for he is leaving Masha, with whom he's been having an affair. 3 Sisters 6 Actors 12 Dollars could not have been more cruelly ironic had they tried.

Out Cry

Photo/Czerton Lim

While performing Two-Person Play, the play within Tennessee William's metadramatic cry for help, Out Cry, the "audience" walks out, leaving Felice (Eduardo Machado) and his sister, Clare (Mia Katigbak) alone, lost in their own world. That’s no surprise: after all, Felice reveals early on that their company has left them: “Your sister and you are—insane!” reads the charming letter. What is surprising is that nobody walks out on NAATCO’s revival of this troubled play. As it happens, the second act is much better: having dispensed with the circumstances, it brushes the madness of “artists [who] put so much into their work that they’ve got little left over for acting like other people.” It is not enough, however, to excuse Machado’s atonal line readings, Thom Semsa’s listless, restless, and senseless blocking, or the constant textual stumbling.

Like many aging writers (think Shakespeare’s “greatest-hits” plays), Williams is pulling together a variety of unfinished themes—the mania that is inevitably absent from Night of the Iguana, the loneliness of The Glass Menagerie. And there are moments in Out Cry that are so poetic that they conjure up dreams of Summer and Smoke. But Felice, upon seeing his sister regress to a childish fascination with soap-bubbles, points out that “they break,” and Machado, in an inappropriately Kowalski moment, swats the bubbles down, channeling an anger that he doesn’t actually feel. In other words, even well-scripted moments on the page, of which there are not many, end up dying by the time they float onto the stage.

The play dreads the unalterable circumstances of life, and Czerton Lim has built an impressively bleak stage—all giant chained pipes and unfinished staircases—to capture a life gone wrong. (“The setting isn’t Morocco,” says Felice, “the cushions just arrived without the sofa!”) But while Williams’s doomed siblings may be in dire straits (and they are far worse off than any of Beckett’s idle characters), there were plenty of things Sesma might have done to make Out Cry more presentable. Instead, he focuses on the technical, playing with light cues to show their inner world, and misses opportunities to draw out a physical difference between the cold tension of the real world and the warm memories of their fantasy, or to delve into the psychological trap of the actor, who must pretend nightly to be mad…without actually becoming so. Sadly, there isn’t an ounce of madness to be found here—it is the actor’s other nightmare, of being trapped in (and being the cause of) a bad play.

The Only Tribe

Photo/Sheree Hovsepian

How does such a simple concept get so conceited? There hardly seems the room for so much stuffiness given the plain stage, gray one-piece outfits, and white minimalist masks (each with a pixilated Katamari Damacy-like cut-out that gives it a “personality”). But sure enough, there’s a trademark in The Only Tribe’s logo. The “simple” stage actually houses 3LD’s Eyeliner technology, which lets Reid Farrington clutter it with commercial images and dancing holograms. Roland Gebhardt’s masked modernity is well-matched by Peter Kyle’s geometric choreography, and they move nicely to Stephen Barber’s chic electronica, but all this conjures is a high-brow Alexander movement class. Perhaps most damning is that Rebecca Bannor-Addae is credited as a writer for this silent piece: you can read her “story” at www.theonlytribe.com, but why bother? You’ll feel even more foolish knowing that Kidao is the name of that omnipresent star and that Lummo is the eldest member of their tribe.

Assuming one manages to surrender to the often redundant (and certainly reductive) actions of these eight dancers, The Only Tribe interprets Bannor-Addae’s mythology. The tall-rectangle masks move about in a hypnotic, synchronous anonymity, every crick of their neck accented by the length of their windmill-blade faces. As they move angularly around the stage, they are supplanted by triangular masks, which writhe like snakes in the garden, their looseness overlapping with the projected images of the old stale Tribe. Then come the weird hybrids of the two—diagonal masks and wide horizontal masks—each with their own appropriate rhythms and movements, all of which (to be fair) the cast nails with mathematical precision and grace.

At this point, images of our own culture begin to pierce the pure anonymity of the Tribe. As the dancers sweep their large masks across the room, images of the Mona Lisa, Disney, Ronald McDonald, and the Statue of Liberty can be seen across their “faces.” In a clever bit of movement, a line of horizontal masks strafe the stage, a stock-ticker flying across their bodies. The evening culminates by taxing the Eyeliner system to layer all the “tribes” over one another, and then to add the detritus of our commercialism: out of that visual din rise a bunch of square masks (televisions, perhaps). However, a few pretty moments and a solid back-beat can’t mask The Only Tribe’s flaw: after all, what is pretension but the meaningless grasp for importance?

metaDRAMA: Art, What Is It Good For?

The December 2008 Harper's has an excellent article from Suki Kim ("A Really Big Show") that talks about the New York Philharmonic's trip to Pyongyang, North Korea (or what she nails as a "fantasia"). The piece questions the morality of traveling to a country like North Korea and focuses on the unease of an oboist's sixteen course meal with people starving outside, but when it comes to actually addressing these issues, the Philharmonic is as repressive with its answers as North Korea is with its citizens ("If you want to talk to our people, we will select ones for you"). What comes across is Lorin Maazel's (the maestro's) bold statement that "Artists . . . have a broader role to play in the public arena. But it must be totally apolitical, nonpartisan, and free of issue-specific agendas. It is a role of the highest possible order." It's a hypocritical statement, especially given that as he sees it, the role is to make bank: twenty-five wealthy patrons accompany the orchestra, at $50,000 a pop, and Suki wisely closes her article with the publicist, Erik Latzky, announcing that "the DVD of the concert would soon be available for $24.99." I agree more with Suki's first-hand account, which doesn't pretend that the music moved the audience to tears (regardless of what CNN and The New York Times may have reported): as she puts it, it was "just a concert." 

I don't think art should be used as a political tool, nor should it risk diluting its purpose for capitalist gains, and the Philharmonic seems to have inadvertently done both. In the theater today, we are unfortunately doing both more than ever. This is not to say that a play can't transcend politics (Betrayed, at the Culture Project) or rise above the money it rode into town on (Avenue Q), but all too often, especially among small independent companies, there's a rush to produce plays that are "relevant" (Two Doors, or the awful As We Speak) or pap that might be digestible enough to move to a larger location. I don't presume to know what the purpose of "art" should be, nor do I wish to imply (contra observations from Isaac Butler at Parabasis) that art needs to do more than simply entertain. But as much as the success of Blasted warms my heart, I get worried on a global scale when reading about the "bigger picture" that seems to be behind artistic development (indeed, as Bush would say [and hopefully not sing] "What is it good for?"), and the directions we seem to be heading.

Cape Disappointment

Photo/Ryan Jensen

“Detroit!” exclaims Paul Thureen, perching uncomfortably beside Hannah Bos in an imaginary but wholly claustrophobic hot-air balloon. “When you’re here, you’re in Detroit!” That line alone, a microcosm of failure in advertisement, captures the mood of The Debate Society’s latest play, Cape Disappointment. When accompanied by the aesthetic perfection of Mike Riggs’s slowly dimming lights, Sydney Maresca’s uncomfortably old-school outfits, the sagging stalks surrounding Karl Allen’s parking-lot set, and the quiet night from Nathan Leigh’s pitch-perfect sound design, that mood only intensifies. Under the steady, familiar direction of Oliver Butler—where the smiles are just wide enough to start to strain—the scene grows even crisper, until the whole thing coalesces into a processed, drive-in movie Schaudenfraude. (Even the popcorn provided is a little cold, a little salty, a little stale.)

These old tricks are good ones for TDS to be up to. At their best--or even here, at their mixed--they have a theatrical craft and eye for storytelling illusion rarely found on stage. However, Cape Disappointment tries to be bigger and better than previous outings, and this is where it stalls. Michael Cyril Creighton and Pamela Payton-Wright are excellent additions to the cast, and both confidently leap into the mundane patter necessary for this atmospheric production. But the transitions are far from seamless: if the play is meant to mimic the unspoken horrors of the ‘50s, then the projector keeps dying, and charm comes across as low-speed nostalgia.

Ironically, this parallels the plays, for these small disappointments are our awkward pleasures, especially when flawed stretches give way to genius moments. At the bottom of the heap is a tale of two linoleum salesmen (Bos and Creighton), who are waylaid on their journey by an old hen (Payton-Wright) and her creepy daughter, weeping over road-kill. The play splices this with the story of a brother and sister (Creighton and Bos) who, after a harrowing experience in the dark woods, find a subtler terror lurking in their aunt’s dementia. But rising out of that is a Lolita-like story— “The Pedophile and the Little Girl” (Thureen and Bos)—that is ruthlessly efficient with its beauty, culminating with a heartbreaking scene that gives weight to the horrors of age.

The promise and decline of Detroit—or at least its advertising—is an apt metaphor. Built piecemeal from unrealized movie dreams, Cape Disappointment works roughly from one moment to the next, a searing collection of red-hot moments: flashlights falling on wooden branches, a girl using a rope to make her lame foot dance, two not-quite lovers gazing silently at the drive-in, and this thought, “They stopped at a llama farm. It was closed.” Cape Disappointment: When you’re here, you’re here.