Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War

The Mad Ones are crazy, but in the best possible way. Though their current motto is "Up with robots, Down with people," they haven't forgotten that every play needs some sort of human heart, and that's given them the freedom to pursue the sort of theater they'd like to make. Why not a play about Russian radio stars who like to sing American country songs and romanticize the good old days, you know, before giant robots tunneled out of the ground and destroyed America? Such is the thinking that leads to Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War, a sweetly apocalyptic tale.

Stationed amidst piles of old, analog radio equipment sits the Host (Joe Curnutte) of the At Home Field Guide, flanked by his acoustic guitarist Alexi "Tumbleweed" Petrovya (Michael Dalto), the lovely singer Anastasia (Stephanie Wright Thompson), and the resident genius, Dr. Mischa Romanav (Marc Bovino). None of them are quite what they once were, frazzled as they are by electrical outages and suspensions of train service, but they put on their game faces, playing whimsical sound effects even in the middle of a most-serious Science Saturday reminder of the Invasion.

So, why not tell a story? In this way, the bold mission of these radio hosts parallels the goal of the theater company--perhaps the goal of all artists--and what follows is as sincere as it is weird. "Amidst an invasion. But there was still love." It's very Golden Age in presentation and flourish, especially with the radio elements of Stowe Nelson's genius sound design, yet flush with hipster cred (particularly in Evan Prizant's costuming of Bovino) and Mike Inwood's dusky aesthetic, which deftly balances the necessary focus on language for the story-within-a-story, but still allows for the visual enhancements of the contemporary plot. Above all, it's so consistently handled--by director Lila Neugebauer--that we are sucked in to this alternate world, curious and eager and excited to see what will happen next.

It doesn't all work--sometimes the forced jollity comes across as too forced, and the back-stories of our Russian heroes are so meagerly developed that some of their glances and actions remain cryptic. But these are minor problems with the framing device: the central story, that of brothers Samuel and Alasdair and the girl they love--in the last months before the 1959 Invasion--is filled with enough parallels to propel the whole thing along. More importantly, this story (written by Bovino and Curnutte) is filled with wonderfully rich language--not dialogue, but miniature poems that entrancingly patter back and forth. One moment, a sort of haiku: "I’ll give you the facts: The fireworks in their eyes. Prairie grass at their knees. Music sifting from parked car windows." The next, a cleverly structured ode: "Susie lived down the road from us. Two houses and a barn between Susie and us. Two houses, a barn, a field, a window, a curtain, and a pebble tap between Susie and us." With all the repetition, onomatopoeia, and shifts in rhythm, the whole thing becomes like a song.

As the two stories--then and now--reach a sort of present-day collision, the tension in the theater continues to build, and there's an earned belief that anything may in fact happen. That's the sort of freedom that the Mad Ones earn by tackling their own type of story on their own terms, and it results in the best kind of theater: the surprising sort.

Enjoy

Photo/Carol Rosegg

"Ah, yes." Such a simple phrase, a line of communication, agreement, understanding, and yet, there's so much more to Enjoy. Toshiki Okada uses a stream-of-conscious, fourth-wall-breaking narrative--best described as the awkward indirect--in order to capture that elusive "more." In execution, the actors simply describe their thoughts and actions in the third-person. But in style, this serves to exaggerates their own self-effacing tones, which in turn amplifies the overall theme of displacement, particularly in relation to age, which is itself simply a matter of perception. In other words--and this play is all about other words--Okada's choice to avoid action/drama is a perfect one, for it so utterly describes the listless fixations and small tragedies of its characters. Having Dan Rothenberg (Chekhov Lizardbrain) direct and the hollowing, postmodern playwright Aya Ogawa (Oph3lia) translate is just icing on the cake.

Deadpan only as much as Beckett, and as driven by the everyday as Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Enjoy is a beautifully reflective production, the unblemished center of a Zen garden. That "Ah, yes" spoken by Actress 1 (the totemo kawaii--very cute--Kira Sternbach), is a response to a reminder from Actors 1 and 2 (Kris Kling and Frank Harts) that her character, Ogawa, is eight years younger than their characters, Kato and Kawakami. She continues along these lines:

I said "Ah yes" even though there is this feeling that like I shouldn't say "Ah yes" myself but.... But it's no, as a way of being told that, ah, yes, yes, this is all stuff I know, obviously, I mean even if I pretended not to know I know, that's the truth, so by saying 'ah, yes' it was just that, I thought it would be more honest, and I'm not just being defensive....

Actress 1's attempts to rationalize her actions while remaining in the moment grow unbearably hysteric as they continue--like a brainy version of Family Guy--as we realize that this is exactly what it is, that it really is sadly funny because it's true. By clinging to the little things, Okada and his characters expose just how shallow they are, unpacking the small talks and anecdotes we exchange with one another.

Thankfully, Okada doesn't follow his own logic to the points of discomfort, merely to the brink, at which point he switches to a parallel set of narrators. Actors 3 and 4 (Steven Boyer and Joseph Midyett) offer the cynically defensive view of the 26- and 27-year-old co-workers; Actor 5, Actress 2 and Actress 3 (Alex Torra, Stacey Yen, and Mary McCool), flesh out the doomed relationship and suicidal thoughts of a yet another 30-year-old co-worker; and then there's Actress 4 (Jessica Almasy), too young--she carries around a teddy bear on her date--to have the "laser-like" worries and focus of a 30-year-old. In another good move, Rothenberg avoids reducing the players to the sort of wincing humor that made Ricky Gervais famous: though he begins with a hyper-realism that draws out the nuances of discomfort--averted eyes, quick smiles, disdainful sneers--he soon shifts to a more malleable sort of abstracted movements that physicalize those emotions.

Enjoy doesn't show an ounce of hyperbole or slapstick, and benefits from avoiding the overwrought wit of the mumble-core genre. Instead, we get the unrelenting realizations of someone like Actor 2, in all its circumlocutory glory: "I am panicked about turning 30 but it's not as simple as that, or like, I actually have turned 30, but to be honest it really hasn't hit me at all, it's like I'm completely deluding myself... and that's where I look at myself and I'm like, wait, is this OK?" He's not deadpan, just serious--even when he adds props, trying to pose for a video camera or to find the right background music for this, the intentionally pretentious video will he records "in anticipation of impending misfortune." Such realizations strike all the characters in different ways: Actor 1, repelling a homeless customer, sees himself in those displaced eyes; Actor 4 and Actor 5, at times speaking as other characters, are obviously able to picture themselves in other shoes; and the Actresses are all, at one point or another, in and out of love.

Enjoy is about the attempt to come to terms with oneself at the current moment. The commonality it discovers--of mortality, of self-awareness, and yet also of life, of romance--is what Okada focuses on at the marvelously poetic conclusion:

"The words come out sounding totally trite," I said, but I was actually thinking how extraordinary this feeling actually is, like don't lump me with anyone else who thinks they can express their feelings with words...but then when you think about all the other people in the world who have used these words throughout history, and their feelings, perhaps each and everyone one of them was experiencing as profound an emotion as I was, actually...and if so, then these trite words...maybe these words are actually enough. 

They are more than enough. They are: Enjoy.

TV: Breaking Bad

I wrote about the third season of Breaking Bad (thus far) for Slant. Read on, before things explode.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl

Photo/Jim Baldassare

Why do people read diaries, memoirs, and personal letters? Perhaps it is because we hope to catch a reflection of ourselves, and thereby learn something in the process. In its own sense, theater operates on a similar level, which makes Marielle Heller's adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner's graphic novel The Diary of a Teenage Girl quite an understandable project. Even though the tale of a 70s girl who falls for her mother's boyfriend--and worse--is billed as fiction, it feels real and relevant--especially to a new generation of young, sexual rebels. It is also immensely aided by Heller's fierce connection to the project--she also plays the diarist, Minnie--and the ways in which co-directors Rachel Eckerling and Sarah Cameron Sunde have maintained the artistry of the tale, projecting a variety of images across this large, shag-carpeted, lived-in space. (It's a scenic designer's dream, one that Lauren Helpern has made a reality, basically imprisoning the audience in a blown-up version of Minnie's bedroom.) However, the show falters in its reluctance to be as graphic as the novel, shying away from nudity and relegating certain characters and scenes to off-stage voices and too-distant illustrations. At times, it is still a powerful play, but like Crumb and American Splendor, the great grotesques of life do not easily transition from one medium to another.

However, what does do well on stage (as it always has) is language, and Heller fills her characters with such awkwardness that we sympathize with them, even when they're wrapped up in drug-addled gang-bangs. (Perhaps even more, at these points.) Moreover, because Minnie continues to record her diaries throughout the show, we constantly see the shifts in perception between her world and reality: "Monroe Rutherford is the handsomest man in the world. As for myself, I am not particularly attractive at all." Neither of these things are true, but one can understand how a fifteen-year-old girl who finds herself the focus of her mother's boyfriend Monroe (the always excellent Michael Laurence) might think so: "I know it seems weird, but I have this strangely calming feeling that even if he touched my tits on purpose it's probably all right because he's one of our best friends and he's a good guy and he knows how it goes and I don't." This naive curiosity, coupled with a teenage girl's energy, is sickly comic gold, though like true graphic novels, it is deeply wedded to a serious heart. The drama slowly builds, often having to chip through facades of childish dreams, but pays great rewards when it does--as with Charlotte (Mariann Mayberry), Minnie's desperately trying to hold-on single mother: "Why me?" Even the underdeveloped ex-step-father Pascal (Jon Krupp) and best friend Kimmie (Neill Mooney) make the most of their moments, at the least giving us a clearer picture of Minnie's development (or lack thereof).

It's thanks to the actors that the dreamy narrative works, for as things quickly leap from significant moment to significant moment (with plenty of awkward, mundane, or comparative ones along the way), the actors remain on hand as touchstones. In this sense, Sunde and Eckerling are able to segue from a comic moment with the girls (they lick an album cover of David Bowie's crotch, convinced they can feel his dick) into a confessional between Minnie and Monroe: "I like it when he kisses me in the little kisses that are not just sexy...I am a little bit scared...I wouldn't know what to do if he really got serious about me...this fear makes me feel all alone." Heller's range in these scenes certainly helps, not to mention her expressive eyes and her lithe frame, which accents characters doe-like vulnerability but also panther-like fire. (It is impossible to discuss her character in ways that do not boil down to sex.) She's confused, but not, angry, but not, prey, but not--and the show is worth seeing just on the strength of Heller's ability to shift between those instantaneous shifts and doubts.

In other words, The Diary of a Teenage Girl is worth seeing as a performance piece, which is as it should be, considering that it cannot hope to recapture all the image-memories of the novel itself. Taken this way, it's also easier to accept the out-of-the-blue revelations about certain characters, the result of theatrical compression and the conventions of the stage. Taken this way, it's also easier to find that glint in a character, that reflection or revelation of self, that makes theater worth living for.

G.B.S.

Letters and numbers are inadequate, state the dueling monologues of G.B.S. There are too many fucking numbers, says Rich. And, adds his brother Sam, letters can stand for just about anything, from grievous bodily harm to George Bernard Shaw. These two would be perfectly happy to stand at opposite ends of the stage, content in their own complaints, except that G.B.S. stands for Guillain-Barre Syndrome, and their father has been paralyzed by it. As a result, Rich and Sam are forced together, though they remain apart, with Jason Hall's script slowly pulling the shared, alternating narrative of these two brothers together. 

Because it would otherwise be a very short play, a lot of things happen as Rich drives Sam to the hospital. Rich uses Sam to "break in" to his ex-wife's apartment complex, hoping to steal back his daughter; one flat tire later, they wind up stranded outside an old classmate's house, each with very different takes on the meaning of "fucking Matthew Wheeler." They even take a literal trip down memory lane, watching the children sled down Indian Hill. Thankfully, Hall fills these scenes with original anecdotes (a major cigarette faux pas), telling details (not just the way Sam reacts to some kids who "rather look like hoodlums," but the way Rich reacts to Sam's unconsciously elite shudder), and a very active voice that allows both actors to jump into the other's monologue (as themselves or other characters, as needed). Because of him, the script avoids the inadequacies of mere "letters" and becomes a tender and comic thing.

Unfortunately, it's a bit rougher on stage: Jay Rohloff is too literal, and he fills the monologues with unnecessary and often goofy action, which in turn contributes to the overacting. For Jason Jacoby, this is less of a problem, as Sam is meant to be a bit dramatic--he's the emotional, gay son, fleeing a town and family that don't understand him. Things work out less well for Curran Connor, who plays Rich so pathetically that it's hard to see why anyone--especially himself--thinks he's tough. As if it were not bad enough that his ex-wife beats him up in an early scene (i.e., Connor throwing himself to the floor), he spends the rest of the play hamming up his "crippling" back injury. Even Josh Windhausen's set gets a bit distracting: those random letters and numbers stare us down, a symbolic choice in an otherwise literal play.

The overt stuff works for Jacoby--particularly when he gloats about his formative sexual experiences--because we don't expect Sam to be that bold, but it actually cripples Connor's portrayal of Rich. It's not until they reach the ICU that Rich becomes more than the sum of Sam's demeaning descriptions. Rich suggests that Sam rub his comatose father's hand, in the hopes that this might help their father's nervous system to "wake up"; this is the sort of delicate touch in G.B.S. that Rohloff is missing, and instead of the clear impression gained by a gentle rubbing, we get a shakier view.