THEATER: Emancipatory Politics

Photo/Morgan Anne Zipf

So imagine that you're hanging with fifteen graduate-school buddies, a philosophical yet fun-loving bunch. It's three in the morning: you've got a second wind on your buzz, and everything looks, feels, and sounds good. This must be life. But wait, set your cooling pizza down for a moment and look across the fourth wall of the room. There's an audience out there, complementary beers in hands, and that is as it should be: after all, you're playing yourself (or a character with your name) and you're living Eric Bland's Emancipatory Politics. This is, perhaps, what it's like to be part of Old Kent Road Theater's ensemble.

If a young Will Eno turned into a Neo-Futurist and wrote a play, this is what you might expect: a carefully curated "dam of consciousness," a bit of political theater that has been freed from the obligation to be (a) political or, strictly speaking, (b) theater. (It takes place, according to one character, in "what the New Yorker refers to as a Mannerist, smash-up era.") At two intermission-less hours and with sixteen characters, the play is too long, especially since it lacks the narrative drive of Bland's previous show, Jeanine's Abortion. However, Emancipatory Politics features an engaging (though somewhat uneven) cast, a group that provokes not the usual physical intimacy of stage (proximity and catharsis) but a mental intimacy (distance and insight). In that light, it hardly matters that characters suddenly decide to wrestle one another, break character in order to do a modern dance, or become the mouthpieces for puppets: at worst, these devices are twee; at best, they put film's so-called mumblecore to shame -- particularly in their low-budget, authentic indie aesthetic. (Abernathy Bland's floor-length drawing springs to mind.)

Though the show aims to make artificial stage dialogue into organic conversation (by removing the traditional "stakes" of a drama), the result is not always compelling enough. It is, however, certainly interesting, and written in a beautifully elliptic style. Beowulf Jones and Morgan Anne Zipf argue about whether or not our society is doomed, quickly shifting from the cynical ("If you're not a bi-curious vegan working for Greenpeace these days, you're not allowed to ride the L train") to the hopeful ("Despite everything, we haven't annihilated one another yet. And this points to something deep in the human soul, a desire to live and go on living as a species, a species that is insecure, violent, and irrational, but also proud, adaptable, and fundamentally decent").

Victoria Tate will muse about the sexuality of eating a peach; Megan McGowan's will offer grim reminders of human cruelty both in and outside our borders. What would be awkward transitions are instead casual in the hands (and mouths) of this cast of smooth talkers; Gavin Starr Kendall calls it being Southern: "Our metaphors don't have to resolve themselves and when we digress you're supposed to find it charming." Consider the way in which Anne Carlisle must connect these thoughts, after a friend asks to borrow her bicycle (to ride from New York to Arizona): "Yeah, just don't scratch it. Or do. I don't care, at all. If you had a choice, would you rather be Orwellian or Kafkaeseque? ... I think Animal Farm is missing a cockroach."

And yet, Emancipatory Politics ends with a feeling of emptiness, for it is an artificial, almost arbitrary, play, no matter how convincingly delivered. OKR claims to be on a "search for meaning in the lives of 20 and 30-something contemporary New Yorkers," and yet that search seems tame, the sort of thoughtful safari that we watch through stained-glass windows: our eyes are glazed over with the beauty of the language, but our hearts are frosted.

MOVIE: Black Swan

Does any filmmaker tie music into his movies as well as Darren Aronofksy? His latest, Black Swan, has healthy helpings of the spiraling madness of Pi, The Wrestler's authentically grim look at the cost of being a professional, and the tightly orchestrated rhythms that made Requiem for a Dream so compelling. The end result is slighter, however, in that the film is meant to mirror a fantasy ballet -- that of Swan Lake -- and thereby really only succeeds in showing the precarious edge between genius and madness: the potential cost, that is, of perfection.

It's an art-house suspense flick, in which the hero, soloist Nina (Natalie Portman), is hunted as much by her preening rivals within the company -- most notably Lily (Mila Kunis) -- as she is by herself. And yet, the film is exquisitely shot by Matthew Libatique and scored by the reliable Clint Mansell (and with healthy doses of Tchaikovsky) to the point of suffocating tension: her pressures and struggles are larger-than-life phantasms and everyday demons, all at once. The film mainly focuses on Nina's troubles, but it does at least hint at the wider implications of fame: her career mirrors that of the company's former star Beth (Winona Ryder) -- now a drunken, broken, discarded wreck -- and rebels against the never-a-lead-dancer ways of Erica (Barbara Hershey), who is now little more than a vicarious, controlling stage mother.

What Aronofsky captures so brilliantly is the sense of high-stakes pressure: there are constant close-ups of the en pointe twists and the agonizing sound effects of physical therapy (foot joints acrackle), the infinite reflections of mirrors (closing in and endless, all at once), and a sense of isolation for the lead -- scorned by her fellow dancers, castigated by her forceful director Thomas (Vincent Cassel), and given her own room. Nina is shown constantly in motion and usually in white, all aflutter and spun around -- manipulated, even -- by those who would lift her up for their own gain. This, of course, fits perfectly with the ideal of beauty that Odette -- the White Swan -- represents, and it's no surprise that Nina begins to crack as she attempts to also portray Odile, the evil Black Swan. After all, she has been told to "lose herself" in the role, to "loosen up" in order to be more perfect, to find the passionate misstep that is in fact the right step toward transcendence.

The thematic motifs -- color shifts between white and black, to say nothing of Portman's increasing aggression, or of Swan Lake itself -- are what elevate the film to art itself, what make it more than a one-note descent into madness. At the same time, the limited colors -- polar opposites, setting the film always at one extreme or another -- are what keep Black Swan from being a masterpiece. The craft is perfect, and so the transcendent surprise is absent; the airtight pressures choke us up, but also suffocate our emotions. It is a swan that does not fly, and yet whose grace nonetheless keeps us spellbound. ---- B+

THEATER: Baby Universe

Photo/Jim Baldassare

Puppets are rarely taken seriously, so it says a lot about the puerile premise of Wakka Wakka's Baby Universe that the terrifically designed and meticulously operated puppets are the most serious part of their show. Much like The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer, the show takes place in an apocalyptic future, with humanity on a desperate mission to save itself -- in this case, from a dying galaxy in which the sun, in one last burst of apocalyptic heat, is burning out. The elaborate scheme of the slapstick scientists (Kirjan Waage and Andrew Manjuck) is to birth a new universe, 7001 (Peter Russo), and to have its "mother" (Gwendolyn Warnock) raise it out of its big-bang infancy to a state of growth large enough such that it can be entered by the remnants of humankind, represented here by the resolutely un-dour host of Apocalypse Radio (Manjuck).

Wakka Wakka's last show here, Fabrik, was an excellent and heartbreaking work, but it was grounded by its subject matter: the Holocaust. This time around, they are untethered by anything realistic: their choices absolve humanity of its environmental recklessness (the Earth is fine; it's the Sun that is dying) and the play carefully skirts the morality of medical testing by largely ignoring the previous seven thousand "failed" baby universes, and by making the scientists such bumbling and innocuous fools. And while Baby Universe resembles a child's fairy tale, especially with a sinister Sun (Manuck) and Moon (Waage) creeping in the shadows, working to abduct and destroy 7001, the play has no consequences, no moral ending.

The puppetry is admirable, and shows a variety of styles: from hand-and-rod babies to hand-in-puppet adults and actor-in-giant-puppet-suit planets. The aesthetic choices work well, too: the Bunraku outfits of the ensemble (which also includes Melissa Creighton) resemble a cross between spacesuits and apocalyptic protective wear (gas masks), and the set (designed by Wakka Wakka and Joy Wang) shows the increasing emptiness of the dying galaxy. But the technical and artistic choices are meant to enhance existing material, material which, in the case of Baby Universe, is largely absent. For a while, it is enough to simply watch the adorable 7001 in its infancy: it can detach limbs in order to play ball with itself, treat its penis like a dog that plays tricks, and throw a cosmic-level tantrum. But at some point, the play needs to grow up; its inability to do so shows a failure on the part of its parents at Wakka Wakka.

THEATER: Angels in America

Photo/Joan Marcus

Threshold of revelation, guys: Angels in America is one of the most over-hyped plays I've ever seen. Irresponsibly long and cripplingly ludicrous, I'm thoroughly convinced that if not for the novelty of the "epic" form coming in the midst of a dark time (1990), to say nothing of the light shed on those living with AIDS ("We will die silent deaths no longer"), Tony Kushner's script might have gotten the paring down it needed. Instead, it remains a gelatinous mush-up of three different (and slightly overlapping) plays, a set in which the only good one is entirely too preachy and chock full o' angels with a penchant for the obvious: suffering is a part of life; it is not the end of it. The flimsiness of Signature's revival -- it feels as if an eighty-person dinner party is being hosted in a studio apartment -- can only be blamed for so much, though you can feel free to lay more blame at the feet of Zoe Kazan, who treats Harper Pitt as an acting exercise.

For all that frustration, Angels in America isn't a bad play, nor is this production unwatchable, thanks to people like Christian Borle, an A-level actor who humanizes Prior Walter's insufferable pathos, captures the hilarity of the angel intrusions, and demonstrates both the unmanageable and manageable poles of life with AIDS. Though Kushner forces Prior to hash out the same accusatory conversation with his boyfriend Louis (Zachary Quinto), who has abandoned him out of fear, Borle manages to find new notes each time, as does Belize (Billy Porter), a sassy drag-queen-turned-night-nurse who, although forced to listen to highbrow rants from Louis and to have redundant conversations with Prior, peppers his own rebuttals with adequate spice. But at the same time, this is the good play: repetitive, whiny, preachy.

The other two major segments should hope for as much: Roy Cohn is a Scrooge-like lawyer who is visited by the ghosts of the people he has wronged in the past, and to his end, he remains an unrepentant bastard, a representation of pure evil: the secret gay who works to destroy gay rights. Frank Wood doesn't find an ounce of nuance with which to present the guy, and the nasally, spittle-flecked accent he chooses for the role is often distracting. Kushner, and director Michael Grief, by extension, treat him like a human pinata, except one who is filled with bile instead of candy: the worse he gets, the nastier he grows. As for Harper Pitt, she's really nothing more than a hallucinating, Valium-popping agoraphobe: it's a thankless, unresolved part that Kushner seems unclear on, glossing over her Mormon beliefs and heartbroken feelings toward her husband, Joe Pitt (Bill Heck). She doesn't come of age here; she just wanders off and isn't pursued. As for Joe, Heck's fine when he escapes the orbit of his play and that of Roy's (he is Roy's chief clerk), and provides one of the few fully developed characters -- a religiously closeted man who begins to open up, to take what he wants, after falling for Louis. And yet, though his mother, Hannah (Robin Bartlett), shows up in the epilogue, he is nowhere to be seen, so perhaps he wasn't that important after all.

Angels in America is littered with soapboxes and straw men, and for all Kushner's lauded genius, it's about as subtle as a thorn in your side. Twenty years later, there are still some uplifting moments, but the six-plus-hour length is unearned, the drama is cheap (it plays on deep emotions the audience is likely to already carry), and the Millennium feels passed by.

THEATER: Goodbye New York, Goodbye Heart

Photo/Rick Ngoc Ho 

Three years ago, the Production Company premiered a short version of Lally Katz's Goodbye New York, Goodbye Heart, a romantic and quirky look at life after death, in which a depressed Caroline visits -- for her friend's wedding -- the "city" of Myspace New York, which has been recreated by the many people who have committed suicide in the real world. While there, she becomes an avalanche dweller -- obsessed and in love with Thornbury, one of the dead -- and just barely escapes before the whole fantasy world crashes. There's a Charlie Kaufman-esque appeal to the concept (think Eternal Sunshine), and a Sarah Ruhl-ish vibe to the language (similar in weight and tone to Dead Man's Cell Phone), but the last three years haven't served Katz's play well: as a full-length (ninety minute) play, it's too stretched out and consequently dry.

Nicolle Bradford -- who played Caroline in the original production, too -- has grown into the role, and gives plenty of life to her character, approaching the sorrow with equal parts of optimism, stubbornness, and anger. But she's surrounded by avatars, not characters, and these shallow representations keep her from connecting with flesh and blood. People like her ex, Andy (Brian Robert Burns), fly in for a scene, peppering the script with curses, and then vanish, without any growth -- and without any real impact. The actors do a fine job, particularly the comic relief of Sally and Claire (Erin Maya Darke and Danielle Slavick), two would-be-vegan chefs, but their role -- giving Caroline a job -- is far too slight, and they wind up a distraction. Some characters -- like Miss Jacklyn (Polly Lee), the flustered, far-gone leader of Avalanche Dwellers Anonymous -- are too cleanly reduced to a function: in this case, representing Caroline in fifteen years, a cautionary zombie. The result feels artificial, especially when the exposition of the dialogue meets the poetry of Caroline's monologues, and it buries the doomed (and one-sided) "romance" between Caroline and Thornbury (a fascinatingly reserved Ryan King) for too long.

These things stand out, as they must, because Valerie Therese Bart's set is meant to be a drab, expressionistically modern, background. It is everywhere and nowhere, and it keeps the emphasis on the more colorful characters (especially in Carolyn Hoffman's outfits) trying to give this fantasy life. But director Oliver Butler -- who has achieved great magic with his own company, The Debate Society -- seems restrained by this too, too solid set: it reduces movement (on the balconies or cramped apartments, or in Caroline's barred apartment) and creates some unfortunate sight lines (courtesy of the giant poles that are part of HERE's space). It doesn't feel as if Myspace New York is slowly fading or "crashing" all around them: rather, it feels like they've been living in the land of the dead from the start.


One of the themes of Goodbye New York, Goodbye Heart is that although nothing is lost in this digital age, those who believe that wind up losing themselves, for they disassociated from the present, from what's real. The same goes for Katz's play, which, in refusing to lose anything, has cut its own heart out.