Hi, I’m Sherri Kronfeld, and this week I’m reporting from the Motherlodge Live Arts Exchange, an cross-disciplinary performance festival which occurs annually in Louisville and New York City.

Founded in 2009 by Ray Rizzo, a genial and multi-talented musician and actor with roots in the Louisville music scene who has performed in plays by Adam Rapp and as a drummer with too many bands to list here, the festival was initially created as a contemporary performance offshoot to the annual Humana Festival of New American Plays.

In just a few short years, Motherlodge has become quite a wild and wooly beast, an inclusive event which has embraced Taylor Mac and Lady Rizo, the live-drawn performance of Ethan Lipton and Michael Arthur, mashups of short plays and rock music by major artists, first looks at new theater and music pieces in development, a curated pop-up art gallery, improv comedy, and even cooking events with an intellectual slant. In the Louisville branch of the festival, shows range from free to $10, and participants include a healthy mix of Louisville locals, art-makers, as well as a smattering of participants from the Humana Festival.

In a conversation about his goals for the festival, Rizzo noted that Motherlodge can be nimble and flexible with its programming, since, as he put it “we are not trying to sustain one particular audience” with a long run of one kind of work. Each show will typically have one to three performances across the weeklong festival, and the shows play to packed houses at non-traditional venues, who come from a variety of backgrounds and attend with the awareness that any night they are likely to catch something completely unique and unannounced- especially as another of Rizzo’s stated goals is to feature artists performing in ways audiences do not normally know them for. Will Oscar-winner Michael Shannon play with a Steely Dan cover band for one-night only? A rumor is spreading..

This year’s festival has grown, moving from one venue- the venerable Rudyard Kipling- to three, live streaming the majority of its events, and expanding its already-catholic embrace to include: an “improvised film scoring explosion and hootenanny”, several Long Table discussions in the style created by Lois Weaver- including one focused around the work of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, a “Live Lunch” radio performance for a live audience presented in partnership with local radio station WFPK, and, in a tip of the hat to this college-basketball crazed town, a screening of the NCAA final presented as a performance/happening that will take place during the breaks of game play, with comedians and musicians scoring the course of the game.

Kaitlin Kelly, Stage Manager meets with Ray Rizzo and festival coordinator Aaron Latos, to go over the schedule of events

This is contemporary performance for the masses, surely. Locals are encouraged to step right in and get involved, including as actors in the most ambitious piece of Motherlodge’s pie this year. “Crawling Between Heaven and Earth” is a roots music-infused re-imagining of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as it might have played out in a rural American river town in the 1920′s. Shakespearian actor, educator, (and former Power Ranger) Jason Narvy, and New York playwright Eric John Meyer, will workshop their show this week, with a cast drawn from several New York actors along with Louisvillians who auditioned just today.

At the Rudyard Kipling on Sunday, the first in-person meeting for Audrey Crabtree, Jason Narvy and Eric Meyer, the artistic team behind "Crawling Between Heaven and Earth".

The music for the show, including new arrangements of 20’s tunes, will be performed by The Slow Charleston and Bonnie Prince Billy. How did the ‘prince’ of indie rock come to take part in the festival? Rizzo bumped into him just a few weeks ago at a music festival, where both were playing, and asked him, of course – just the kind of happy accident/surprising collaboration that makes this festival a joyful playground for artists and audiences. Stay tuned for further dispatches from Louisville later this week!

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Teatr ZAR from piece "Gospels of Childhood The Triptych" (part 3). Photo: Irena Lipinska

Teatr ZAR’s  The Gospels of Childhood Triptych (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, March 29-April 1, tickets $28) is about sound– ‘zar,’ meaning either bell, or a song of lament. Its work delves deeply into the ancient vocal traditions of the Caucuses: pre-christian songs with words so old no one understands them any more. Back when casting a spell just meant having some strong words in the right tone.

The group comes straight out of the Grotowski Institute, where it is resident company. It developed as a project over the course of four years, as Grotowski apprentices took yearly research trips out to the Caucasus to  learn and collaborate with the communities in the mountains of Georgia, where these songs are still used in funeral traditions. Every year at the Prague Quadrennial, the Polish pavilion has some flavor  of Grotowski, and ZAR is evidence of Polish work that is still steeped in his influence. “The Gospels exemplifies a trend in contemporary Polish theatre, described as ‘theatre out of the spirit of music.’,” writes MCA.

The Gospels of Childhood Triptych will bring the audience onto the MCA stage for two of its three acts– the second act will take place on MCA’s second-floor atrium. Each of the acts draws upon a melange of ancient singing traditions– from Chechen, Bulgarian, Geogian, Greek and beyond– to tell a series of ancient stories about ancient human experiences: youth, death, pain. The story sources range from the apocryphal gospels to a Polish romantic poet. Culturebot will be there on Thursday, curious to witness the movement that accompanies this sound: dance, ritual, experiment. We’ll let you know what flickers in the candlelight.

“Zar sung during Gospels of Childhood performance is, in fact, one endless cry of humanity; a column of breath for us, as well as for past and future generations,” writes MCA. The event is co-produced by MCA Stage and the Goodman Theatre.

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The show that’s starting little theatre-student walkouts in Chicago these days is Camino Real (through April 8th: tickets $21-65) an adaptation of the original, dark and dreamlike play by Tennessee Williams at the Goodman Theatre. We’ve talked recently about plays a lot here on Culturebot, but let’s not let that word dominate here. This is not a play for a fake living room,  or even a fake-stone plaza. In fact, a realistic set is an oft-cited reason for the failure of Camino’s original production, directed by Elia Kazan. This is an adaptation in the postmodern sense, to the point where one of the scripts’ chief co-creators often refers to his work as “cut and paste.” As in, cut from Tennessee Williams’ life and paste into the script. Raw, violent butt-fucking included.

That creator would be Marc Rosich, a Spanish playwright who has worked often with controversial director Calixto Bieito, the director of this piece for the Goodman. “This time we needed some extreme editing,” he said when I sat down with him in the lobby of the theater. “This play has never been successful in a way, there have been so few productions of it, and they have always been misunderstood.”

“In the 50s Tennessee Williams was writing for a tradition, it was really difficult to break, but now, 70 years later, so much has happened . .”  says Rosich. “We trusted his first intuitions– doing poetic theatre. We decided to throw out all these realistic scenes, and going to the core of the poetry.”

The set for the Goodman production is dark, a black stage with a cage wall looming over it upstage. In this cold landscape, designed by Rebbecca Ringst, the characters of Camino stride and stumble, moving from one scene to the next with a simple step. Lighting invades to transform the space– a billowing of neon signs and lightbulbs flies in with the fiesta, a lonely series of globes float above lonely light lines below. A blast of light blows in from the side to cast even the cage lines in dark shadow. James F. Ingalls’ lighting works with the scenography to carve emotional hollows into the blackness.

The origins of Williams’ characters are gone from this adaptation, and Williams himself is put onstage as a character, reciting lines original to both Quixote and the Dreamer, swilling liquor and puking. He sits on the edge of the stage and strums the guitar, underscoring the action. Some roles are combined in this Goodman production: one actor plays several “officer” or official roles. Camino Real is a no-man’s land in which these characters are trapped, battling each other for survival and some semblance of pleasure while still grasping at the real and sweet parts of life. Says Rosich, “I’m not interested in plots at all, but in characters. For the character itself to be the most important ingredient in a play.”

Rosich acknowledges the specificity of this adaptation. “I’m doing an adaptation for Calixto  . . . He thinks operatically in a way, not psychologically.” The adaptation is developed in the rehearsal room, along with the scenography and lighting design. As a result, the piece develops a language unto itself: a pacing unique to its dream-landscape. There are points that can only be described as awkward, where it’s clear a kind of scene is being set, but we as audience don’t get the context until a few lines in. There are moments when a turn of the head denotes an entirely different time, place, moment. It’s confusing, like a dream, and scary, like a dream.

While ambiguity is scary, what’s more disturbing is the violence– graphically mimed sex, a heart ripped from the chest, murders, robberies, simple derogatory and demeaning acts. “Sexuality, brutality and violence is part of our world, ” says Rosich.  “[Here] you are sharing it with an audience. It’s not 3-D cinema, it’s real 3D.” Still, says the writer, the brutality of Camino Real comes as much from the life of Tennessee Williams as the tradition of Calixto Bieito. In Williams’ memoir, for instance, there are “So many descripton of cruel sexuality. There is one chapter where he explains, he and a friend they met these sailors or whatever, and they ended up doing an orgy, in his apartment, but these sailors ended up beating them both after fucking him.” So the violent butt-fucking we get in the first 40 minutes of the play comes not from nowhere.

“The skeleton of the piece is there,” says Rosich, referring to the dialogue of several central characters in the original play, and foremost, the arc of the main character Kilroy, a naive failed boxer who has stumbled unwillingly into this purgatory.  He enters in a procession of tiny American flags. In this particular show, it’s almost as if Kilroy were a metaphor for “puritanical” American culture in a world of violence and loss.  And that dimension is pretty brutal itself. Says Rosich,  “We tried to recreate the allegories and the metaphors that was proposing [sic] Tennessee Williams.” For a guy who had to spend his whole life hiding his homosexuality, some brutal criticisms might have been necessary. Rosich’s task has been to negotiate both the landscape created by Williams and the mind of the artist himself.

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Hi everyone, Andy here. Hope you’ve been well. We here at Culturebot have been super-busy seeing shows, writing, planning, etc. It has been an action-packed year so far and there’s a lot going on over the next 12 months. So be sure to keep checking back for more news.

Personally, my day job is getting pretty hectic as we do our Access Restricted discussion series and gear up for this year’s awesome edition of the River To River Festival (be a part of it! Dance with Sylvain Emard) – so my writing contributions may be a little more sporadic.

So okay, enough of that. Let’s talk about art.

Friday night took us to Exit Art for their final opening. After 30 years they are closing up shop with two exhibits Every Exit is an Entrance: 30 Years of Exit Art and Collective / Performative. It just so happens that Culturebot was invited to be a part of the Collective/Performative exhibit and we’re totally honored and kind of in awe. When we went to the opening and saw, in one place, all the amazing artists that Exit Art has supported and nurtured over the past 30 years, it was kind of crazy to think that we would be a part of it. It as a great party where art stars who were young kids in the 1980s were hanging with young artists of today and you could really feel the energy, connection and creativity. Unlike other fancy gallery openings I’ve been too, this felt like the real deal, not just a “see and be seen” for big money types. More on that later as we finalize Culturebot’s program at Exit Art for the week of April 17-21.

Saturday night we went to NYLA to see David Neumann’s new work with Advanced Beginner Group, Restless Eye. I will always have a soft spot for David Neumann’s work. His show Sentence was one of the first dance pieces that I really, truly enjoyed. I was working at PS122 at the time, where it was presented, so I got to actually see the work develop a bit and then see it multiple times over a few weeks. The humor, the text by Will Eno, the pedestrian movement, all gave me access to new ways of looking at dance and was pretty pivotal in my understanding of the form. From that work I could go out into all the different dance directions.

In Restless Eye Neumann is working with a different writer, Sybil Kempson, who seems to be everywhere this spring, and his collaborators in Advanced Beginner Group – Kennis Hawkins, Neal Medlyn, Andrew Dinwiddie, Jeremy Olson and Victoria Roberts-Wierzbowski – to create an atmospheric riff on the intersection of human experience as enhanced or mitigated by technology. Interpolating Chekhov and other sources, Restless Eye seems to create a tense juxtaposition between a more rustic, pre-digital way of life with the disconnectedness and information overload of the Internet age. There isn’t a whole lot of text, actually, but Kempson’s voice is ever-present – her fascination with New Jersey, with the mysteries of the road, with a vaguely threatening suburbia, a suggestion of existential unease in every moment.

Neumann’s choreography has gotten (it seems) a little more lyrical and expansive and he uses long, tall performers like Kennis Hawkins and Neal Medlyn to create elongated poses and gestures that exist in neat contrast to the more confined movements, focused on the arms, of other dancers.

There was a beautiful house, essentially a video screen, that changed from scene to scene and the sound design was enjoyable – moving from a spacey/digital soundscape to fractured language to something approaching music from time to time – a warbled “This Much Is True” playing as if from a house across the lake, etc.

Overall, though I enjoyed the piece, I frequently lost the thread and couldn’t always draw connections between one sequence and another. They flowed quite nicely into each other, but I was often disoriented and I didn’t feel that there was necessarily a cumulative effect. My eye was, in fact, restless – and maybe that was part of what I was meant to take away.

So in the interest of time travel let’s rewind to March 4 at PS1 where we went to check out Marten Spangberg do his thing. Spangberg is a Swedish choreographer and art star who leverages his outsize personality and keen intellect to propose scenarios around performance, visual art, choreography and dance. At PS1 he gave a performance/lecture based on his “book” Spangbergianism. Ostensibly the book came out of his deep and ongoing despair around his work as a choreographer, so he sat down and blogged for 60 days in a row then took the 60 posts and compiled them into a book. He called the blogging “choreography” and the book “dance” and went from there, critiquing dance, choreography, politics and the current visual arts/museum fetish for performance. Anybody who reads Culturebot regularly knows my basic thoughts on that, so I’m not going to re-hash it all here. I quite enjoyed the lecture, though some of my peers, apparently, did not. Raising, to my mind, the question: when is critique performance and when is it not?

But anyway – I did have a few thoughts on reflection after Spangberg’s lecture:

Dance is only one possible outcome of choreography. Choreography as an organizing principle or set of theories around the possibilities of bodies existing in time and space; much as architecture is a set of tactics and theories around the possibilities of the built (or unbuilt) environment.

Spangberg talked about the moment – though he didn’t use the term – of aesthetic arrest. And I thought of this wonderful poem:

- Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”:

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Subsequently Spangberg referenced this idea of choreography/art as a squid and/or monster that is simultaneously two things and nothing, that is incomprehensible and demands to be apprehended on its own terms. In an email to him (I have not received a response) I wrote:

Re “squid” and the monster idea….. I’m not a religious/spiritual person but in Jewish theology (in the Hebrew) the word that is translated as “God” or “Yahweh” is in fact what is known as an “ineffable tetragrammaton” (יהוה) – it is unpronounceable and incomprehensible, pointing to the indivisible one-ness of the divine – which of course suffuses all Being. The subjective confrontation with the unknowable (and inseparable) One is the aspiration of mystics, etc. etc. Moving along those lines, I think of the idea of “afflatus” or inspiration, from Cicero, according to Wikipedia: “…”inspiration” came to mean simply the gathering of a new idea, Cicero reiterated the idea of a rush of unexpected breath, a powerful force that would render the poet helpless and unaware of its origin.”

I’m having trouble closing the circle on this one – something about how art, being inspired by the ineffable, is in and of itself ineffable and beyond form, existing outside of time and space, coming into embodiment for a brief moment and then vanishing again. We defy commodification because we are only playing with that which will vanish and return to the nothingness from which it came, performance is the brief temporal and physical manifestation of ideas and entities that are always extant in the ether: dancers, musicians, performers, writers, bring them into being briefly, long enough for us to observe and try to fix in memory, before they disincorporate and vanish yet again….

Dude. I totally used to drop acid, like, a lot.

Okay so after Spangberg I had a bunch of work commitments until March 8 when I got to see Jodi Melnick at NYLA for her double-bill of One of Sixty Five Thousand Gestures and Solo, Deluxe Version. What an amazing evening! One of Sixty Five Thousand Gestures was co-choreographed with Trisha Brown and Jodi just has Brown’s choreography deep in her body. It was transfixing to watch, just beautiful. The composition by Hahn Rowe was ethereal and evocative and Melnick moves with precision, elegance, grace and subtle emotion.

That was followed by Solo, Deluxe Version where she worked with dancers Jon Kinzel, Hristoula Harakas and Stuart Shugg on a series of pieces linked together. Once again, just great movement, top-notch dancers, evocative, subtle, surprising, elegant. But the extra added bonus was live, original music from Steven Reker and his band, People GetReady (Luke Fasano, James Rickman and Jen Goma). They were fantastic, veering from rock-type riffs to spaceier, almost raga-like repeated figures, to atmoshperic sound to sections that almost sounded like songs. Great night, glad I got to see it.

The next night. Friday March 9, took us to The Kitchen to see Pam Tanowitz’ Untitled (The Blue Ballet). The piece was set to the FLUX Quartet’s interpretation of avant-garde composer Morton Feldman’s challenging String Quartet #1. Feldman is very minimal and sparse and the choreography took that as a starting point, using ballet – and ballet dancers – as source material and then stripping away all the frills down to some very sparse, select, precise movements. The piece was alternately fascinating and frustrating – less because of the intentional exploration of absence, time and emptiness, but because it just felt, to me, somewhat cold and analytical. That being said, perception is everything. I was frequently riveted by Ashley Tuttle who seemed to verily radiate. My colleague seated next to me found her to be conventional and mechanical. Go figure. But it is always, always a delight to see incredibly well-trained dancers re-purpose their skills into a contemporary context.

Saturday March 10 took us to The Joyce for Stephen Petronio’s The Architecture of Loss. The evening began with Petronio coming onstage and doing a five minute intro to his staging of Steve Paxton’s “Intravenous Lecture”. This was probably my favorite part of the whole evening, as he started talking about the time he saw Nureyev dance and then, within a few months, met Paxton and then Trisha Brown. In five minutes Petronio explained in the most succinct and personal way, the evolution of dance from Ballet to Modern to Post-Modern to Contemporary. And he did it with words AND his body. He physically demonstrated the transition from Nureyev’s rigid spine to Paxton’s flexible spine, from being oriented towards the audience to existing in 365-Degree space. It was beautiful. Then he started “Intravenous Lecture” which was kind of cool – he’s a great dancer – but I wasn’t so in love with the text.

Also on the bill was Wendy Whelan doing a short solo called “Ethersketch I” which was amazing. In some way this seemed to draw a line from Melnick on Thursday, to Tanowitz on Friday through to Petronio on Saturday. Something about the evolution of dance, the influence of ballet, of Trisha Brown… something about the way embodied movement can, ideally, comment on what it means to us, as non-dancers, to exist in the embodied world. Hm.Food for thought. I pass this on to you, dear reader, to expand and comment.

Monday night I had some family in from Mississippi and was at a loss as to what to do with them. Broadway being dark and so forth. Luckily I remembered that Rinde Eckert’s show And God Created Great Whales was playing at 45 Bleecker, produced by The Culture Project. My uncle and his wife are both mental health professionals, so it seemed like a show about a man losing his memory to Alzheimer’s (or some related if unnamed disorder) would be interesting. I think they liked it. I know I did. It has been many years since I first saw it but it held up in the new version. Rinde Eckert is just one of those artists who has incredible presence and a unique, fascinating creative sensibility. I’ve rarely been disappointed by his work and this is a great example of blending music/opera with poetic writing and imaginative, dream-like staging to create a kind of memory play, a sad, moving and intimate portrait of a man trying to hold on to his identity as it slowly erodes. Universal and tragic, powerful stuff.

Thursday, March 15 took me to the Gene Frankel Theater to see Lost & Found Project’s Doroga. ДOROGA, is a play that explores personal family stories about the Russian-Jewish immigrant experience from the current generation of 20-somethings, intertwining with the history of Jews in the countries of the Former Soviet Union (FSU).

Not normally my kind of thing, but Culturebot’s office is frequently located at the back tables at Shoolbred’s, because they have a great two-for-one happy hour, a fireplace in winter and no televisions. And one of our favorite bartenders is Mariya King, and she’s part of this company and, well, you know, you gotta support your bartender, am I right? Also, I used to work in Jewish Culture so I kind of feel like I want to check in on things from time to time. Also, when I worked in that world I gave a lecture on “Envisioning Contemporary Jewish Theater and Performance” and I keep hoping that someone will actually do it, rather than replicate the same sort of conventional, narrative-based, work that confines identity to this very narrow slice of reality. Here’s that lecture, which is about 20 minutes long so you can just watch it some other time:

Envisioning Contemporary Jewish Theatre Lecture from Andy Horwitz on Vimeo.

ANYWAY – ДOROGA aroused in me the same feelings I often have about earnest, culturally-specific work. It feels cruel to criticize because it obviously means a lot to everyone involved and it definitely means a lot to the audiences that come and see it. It is validating and gratifying to see one’s “story” on stage, but at some point you have to make work that matches the critical and aesthetic standards of a general audience. That comes over time and I certainly hope that the young, enthusiastic and energetic team involved with this production continues to develop their craft, maybe gets exposed to performance makers who are doing more innovative work around culturally-specific performance and evolve into something more rigorous.

Friday March 16 took me to HERE Arts Center to see 64, written by Culturebot’s own Austin, TX correspondent Timothy Braun and presented by Surf Reality. I used to go to Surf Reality back in the day (it is now a “hot yoga” studio) when it was a teeming pit of cheap beer, cigarettes and weird LES performance art depravity. Glad to see that Rob Pritchard and Co. have not grown up too much! The technical elements – laptops, videos, sound design, etc.- have gotten a lot more sophisticated, the scenarios make a little more sense and there is a lot less in the way of bodily fluids and on-stage nastiness, but that same kind of DIY. rough and ready, a view from underground aesthetic still applies.

Timothy Braun was at an artist retreat when he met Jennilie Brewster who was in the midst of creating 4 paintings, often using NY Times images as source material. Braun was inspired to write 64 one page plays, and Pritchard then reimagined the plays as a kind of multimedia collage. Images come and go, soundscapes are mixed live, people meet, interact and vanish. Sometimes stories seem to reflect on each other and connect, sometimes they just appear and then drift off into the ether. 64 is a fluid, floating nightmare dreamscape of America going down in flames.

Speaking of which, if only tangentially, Saturday the 17th took us out to Bushwick Starr for Karma Kharms directed by Eliza Bent as part of Target Margin’s Last Futurist Lab. It was fun and crazy and silly movement-based, ensemble work with live origami-folding. It was based on the writing of Daniil Kharms an early Soviet-era surrealist and absurdist poet, writer and dramatist. I don’t know exactly how this all fits into Futurism (someone send me a press kit, pronto!) but I do think that there is probably a darker, more dangerous component to all of this. I’d surmise that so much of art in the early 20th Century was an attempt to assimilate the startling velocity of change that as much as it will sometimes appear frivolous to us, there is a kind of manic, nervous laughter attached, floating above a deep, ontological terror about the death of God and the dawn of essential meaninglessness. And the onrush of a new century birthing unprecedented genocide enabled by previously unimaginable weapons of mass destruction. But Karma Kharms was fun.

Sunday the 18th took us to Abrons Arts Center for a concert by Alarm Will Sound, part of the American Mavericks Festival presented by Carnegie Hall. The concert featured work by Cage, Varese and three others (I lost my program) and it was really great. It was free and the place was packed, even at 3PM on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Alarm Will Sound, led by Brooklyn Philharmonic’s Alan Pierson, is a diverse and dynamic 20-person ensemble who are always presenting new and imaginative interpretations of iconic material, supporting the work of early career composers and arrangers and just generally breaking down barriers left and right. You should definitely check them out.

Then more work then Friday and we’re back to Exit Art which brings us back to today. Sunday. Which I’ve now spent writing this column. SO MANY SHOWS SO LITTLE TIME!!!

Okay, hope you’ve all been having an art-tastic month and we look forward to seeing you out and about!!

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Friday night took us out to The Bushwick Starr for Nellie Tinder‘s new project Evelyn, written and directed by Julia May Jonas. This is Jonas’ most ambitious and fully-developed project to date and it marks a real turning point, I think.

On the most straightforward level, Evelyn is the story of a group of women in a mental institution/recovery facility who are trying to rebuild themselves after a variety of traumas and breakdowns. In that sense it brings to mind a number of other works in a similar vein like Girl, Interrupted or, at times, Todd Haynes’ Safe, which has been described as “a horror movie of the soul.” By the show’s conclusion it has morphed into something more akin to Euripides’ The Bacchae. (I thought I was all clever and original on that, until I saw that Jacob Gallagher-Ross draws the same parallel in his review over at The Village Voice. Anyway, if both of us agree, then there’s probably something to it.)

The show begins with Holly (Kate Schroeder) and Nicky (Lisa Clair) sitting downstage and complaining about fellow resident Tiffany (Jocelyn Kuritsky was cast, on Friday she was replaced due to injury by Julia May Jonas). Becky (Kate Benson) and Elisa (Zoe Geltman) are stage left, walking stiffly upstage and down. From the outset the dialogue is stylized and funny, but definitely rings true to the situation. Holly says:

“She’s got to change. We can’t be expected to lead her to safe harbor when she just wants to drown. We have to take care of ourselves. We’re here for us, not her! No matter how leaderly we become, we have to remember we’re here for us.”

In just a few lines Jonas paints the scene at the institution quite clearly – the insecurities and neuroses, the internecine warfare and petty squabbles of unbalanced people in close confinement, the way minutia are amplified under the microscope of psychology. Later we will learn that they have breakout sessions after every meal to discuss how they feel and group sessions every evening before bed. Every thought, every feeling, every interaction is surgically parsed and evaluated, in search of the root of their dysfunction, in a desperate quest for a cure to make them whole and return them to normalcy. Holly is the ambiguously unstable, possibly slutty one. Nicky is the victim of sexual abuse from her uncle, Becky is the oldest, the school principal and mother who just cracked under the pressure, Elisa the misfit artsy teenager who writes dark Broadway musicals about Tesla and the Ancient Egyptians, Tiffany is the “bad” one – the antisocial one who rejects therapy, who will probably be a lifer. Later we meet Brooke (Nikki Calonge) who can only speak in howls and murmurs, though the audience privy to her thoughts by way of inner monologue.

Watching over all of them is the spectral Gertie (Richard Saudek, in drag) who is the enforcer and observer, the minion of Dr. Katie Doctors (Lucy Kaminsky) – the benevolent but fearsome head of the institution. She insists that the patients refer to her as Katie, and her nurturing, caring surface just barely hints at the menace beneath. She is no Nurse Ratched, but her compassion and placidity suggest the possibility that the whole enterprise is an exercise in futility and ineffectuality, she is dangerous because she is benign.

Into this tinderbox enters Evelyn Henries (Hannah Heller) who, for unknown reasons, has been sent to the institution to recover her mental health. From the beginning, when Henries enters in mini-skirt and heels, unable to sit down on the floor to join in group therapy, circling the ladies like a lioness circling prey, we know this won’t end well. Evelyn will not break down, she will not be common like everyone else, she will not join in and she will not “recover”. The only question is what she will do and who she will destroy to get what she wants.

What happens from there is a fascinating study in manipulation. I’m trying to think of another female character that is so spectacularly amoral and chameleonic. Evelyn has a talent for honing in on other’s weaknesses and desires, seducing them with kindness and promises while exploiting them for her own ends. She brings a halo of glamour and shines it on the mortals around her, the women compete for her affections which she doles out, discreetly, to each. Even Katie falls under Evelyn’s spell and ends up kissing her passionately at the conclusion of one of their therapy sessions.

Of course this is where things go horribly, horribly wrong, as the destruction that Evelyn has sown boils over. The Woods – a mysterious area away from The Castle where the women live – has been a site for Tiffany’s magickal ceremonies and incantations. She shared this with Evelyn and now Evelyn intends to lead all the women into the woods to be destroyed, or destroy each other. But the destructive energy she has unleashed turns on her instead and she is destroyed in a frenzied, unspeakable bacchanal.

So okay, that’s the plot, basically. It really spurred a lot of thought about many things – but mostly about the feminine voice, presentational aesthetic and the prejudices against that voice in a male-dominated culture.

First I think of the set-up as a whole. If a man wrote a piece about a mental health institution (say, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) the group dynamic would merely be the backdrop for the arc of the heroic lead, which culminates in escape, death or destruction. In Evelyn, the group dynamic is the focus of the plot. I know it sounds stereotypical, but I think of Fefu And Her Friends and this sort of shift into exploring multiple interactions and group dynamics, how they accumulate to create an outcome. The arc is not predicated entirely on the actions of one individual, but a collection of actions and a confluence of circumstances. This seems like part of the “feminine gaze” if you will.

I also wonder if a man had written such an evil character as Evelyn Henries, would it have been dismissed as unacceptable sexism? Jonas writes very deftly and does such a good job of delineating the world of the institution and the individuality of each character, that Evelyn seems to draw on a uniquely feminine, Mean Girls-type sensibility and archetype. This show is universal, but it is also about women, about how they interact in confinement and out of sight of society. In that way it references years and years of misogynist psychotherapy, from diagnoses of hysteria to penis envy.

So then I think about aesthetics. The show opens – and is threaded throughout – by songs and musical interludes performed by the actors. Lucy Kaminsky plays flute, one of the characters plays violin, there are scenes of the women drawing, doing art projects, knitting. The style of the music is home-made and simple, the women’s voices are on-tune but somewhat weak. They are not Broadway Belters, they are real girls. These things make me think of Karinne Keithley’s Montgomery Park, her instinct for framing the domestic, framing the things that women do – or are conventionally attributed with doing – as artful, generative acts that resist glorification. Symbolically – if not actually – girls in high school play flute, take art, knit, they grown into women who either hold onto these things or reject them, but these things retain resonance.

Along those lines, Jonas’ poetic language and phrasing call to mind Keithley, but also, obliquely, Tina Satter. Jonas, from time to time, embraces the kind of slang-y uptalk that one hears in Satter’s writing, but while Satter and Half Straddle embrace an aesthetic of intentional informality suggesting amateurishness, Jonas employs a more formal and disciplined approach. The lines are delivered more tautly, the actors are more actor-ly, the staging is, generally, more precise and more formal. In fact, the only times that Evelyn seems to lose momentum are some of the movement sequences that seem a little undisciplined and wobbly. My experience of the work was that some of the movement-based interludes and the climactic closing sequence seemed a bit drawn out and overtly literal. I think I understand, kind of, what Jonas was going for, but I don’t think she quite achieved it.

Despite a few weak spots, Evelyn is a really compelling, entertaining and insightful show that keeps you engaged and thinking throughout. The actors are uniformly excellent and the production elements – set, lights, sound – are not only aesthetically successful but professionally executed. There were several moments when I sat there and thought – why couldn’t this be at The Atlantic or Second Stage or Playwrights? And I thought of Claudia LaRocco’s essay on Theresa Rebeck and gender stereotypes on Broadway and realized that, sadly, this kind of work is still, unbelievably, only to be seen downtown (or in Brooklyn as the case may be).

In writing this article it really hit home that we have a wonderful variety of talented women writers working in “downtown” theater at the moment. Many of them are, in their own way, exploring language, aesthetics and ideas that are related but very different. They are articulating a kind of post-post-post feminism that embraces history while struggling to articulate a vision of the future. It is not about reaction to male-dominated society, nor, like Untitled Feminist Show, predicated on imagining some kind of feminine Utopia, but rather it is about integration and agency. It is about voice – precisely what UFS avoided – and about self-definition.

Anyway – I’ve rambled enough. Go see Evelyn!
It is playing at The Bushwick Starr until March 10th, 2012.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Tuesday night took us to St. Ann’s Warehouse to see Early Plays, a collaboration between Richard Maxwell’s New York City Players and The Wooster Group. Early Plays is a collection of three of Eugene O’Neill’s “Glencairn” plays, woven together with songs by Maxwell, who also directs. In these plays O’Neill is drawing on his own experience as a merchant seaman, following a group of shipmates on the British tramp steamer Glencairn from port to sea and back to port.

The show is staged on the same set that The Wooster Group used for their productions of O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape – so there’s an interesting continuity here, not only in the way Early Plays is constructed, but in tracing the history and evolution of The Wooster Group’s engagement with O’Neill. I haven’t seen their production of The Hairy Ape, but I still remember being blown away by the revival of The Emperor Jones at St Ann’s a few years back. Kate Valk was a powerhouse in that show, projecting size, power and intensity completely out of proportion to her diminutive frame. She’s just one of those actresses who can fill a stadium with her presence and performance.

Early Plays stands in contrast to the heightened theatrics of The Emperor Jones. With nary a Wooster Group device in sight – no over the top theatrics, no video, no meta-meta-commentary – Maxwell, the master of affectless acting and textual precision, brings his style and vision to O’Neill’s work to wonderful effect.

O’Neill wrote the script in dialect, essaying to replicate the poetry of the veritable Babel of tongues and accents on the ship. The Glencairn’s crew, drawn from seaman from all parts of the world, was a melange of scalawags – British, Irish, Dutch, Swedish, West Indian, Russian and more. Each character brings their own accent, vernacular and individual quirks to the group. We are left with the impression of a group of rough men from different backgrounds who share some common traits – a feeling of outsiderness, discomfort on land, restlessness and a taste for adventure – commingled with a sense of yearning for the normal life they could have lived but for some intangible personality trait or quirk of fate that has doomed them to a life of roaming the seas.

One can imagine a more traditional production of these plays where a dialect coach was hired and they tried to use the written text merely as a jumping off point to some kind of linguistic verisimilitude. But here Maxwell uses his signature simplistic approach to language to open up O’Neill’s writing and imagination in a richer way than “realism” could ever achieve. By having the actors stay absolutely faithful to the words as written on the page and deliver the lines in the affectless, declamatory style that is Maxwell’s hallmark, we really hear what O’Neill has written. And though at times the flat delivery of the archaic language can bring unintended comedy, mostly it works – and the laughs that do come are rarely disruptive or jarring. We are not thrown out of the world of the play by some kind of cognitive dissonance, but rather we share a subtle, joyful moment of awareness. It is eery, really, that these men, so far removed from us in time and experience, and O’Neill’s affection for them, his attempt to render them vividly real, still resonates with a modern audience. Not in a traditional realistic way, of course, but in a metaphoric way.

Essentially what Maxwell has done is transform O’Neill into Beckett. Slightly more naturalistic – the events that befall the sailors are tangible and recognizable but still resonate with an existential undertone. We are, all of us, lowly sailors on a ship of fools: prey to our ignorance and base desires, to our futile daydreams and the relentless wearying strain of the day-to-day. There are moments of distraction and interludes of joy, we strain again and again to connect to each other and find a wider meaning, but in the end we are vanquished by nature and time.

All of the actors are fantastic – the cast is made up almost entirely of NYCP/Wooster Group regulars, and it is always a pleasure to see Jim Fletcher, Ari Fliakos, Brian Mendes and the rest of the gang on stage together. Over the years they have developed an ease and rapport that translates well to the audience. The ladies – Kate Valk and Kaneza Schaal – do a lot with the little they have to work with. O’Neill’s worlds – and to some extent Maxwell’s – are male-dominated and the women aren’t given a lot to say or do.

The adaptable set – really not much more than a scaffold with pulleys – is used to good effect, as is a smoke machine and the lighting. Though abstract, we get the sense of life on (and off) the sea, the cramped quarters, the bad food, the instability and harshness of a life exposed to the elements and subject to Acts Of God.

On a mostly-unrelated tangent, I think back to a production of Mourning Becomes Electra that I saw in Seattle in the early 90′s, directed by Dan Savage and produced by his theater company, Greek Active. Like every good theater major, I studied O’Neill in college and he was firmly situated in the world of “realism”. While we were taught that he aspired to create great American Tragedies in the spirt of the Greeks, it was difficult to imagine how this stilted, wooden prose and these melodramatic scenarios could possibly be construed as great tragedy. I still will, on occasion, jokingly pull out a line from Desire Under The Elms – “Right purty fahm, eh, Eben?” (I totally know that I’ve misremembered the line, but I have this image in my head of Anthony Perkins, who I think played in it back in the day, doing a New England accent…).

Anyway – Greek Active’s Mourning Becomes Electra was performed, of course, in drag. I don’t remember who played the Clytemnestra character, but I think the Electra character was played by Seattle stalwart Charles Smith (memory is fuzzy, corrections welcome). The staging blew my mind. Clytemnestra was in huge platform shoes (think: cothurni) with flowing gowns. They were all heavily made-up so as to appear masked, and all the actors delivered their lines, in the grand tradition of drag theater, in over the top histrionic tones. The emotions were, of course, completely unrealistic, as was the entire production, and somehow the heightened theatricality and irreverence cut through O’Neill’s pretensions to get to the heart of the tragedy underneath. It was the first time that I could see -and feel- the direct connection from O’Neill to Aeschylus and access what the play was trying to convey.

The connection between this and Early Plays, I suppose, is that Maxwell and TWG, by stripping O’Neill’s work of its realism, are able to penetrate to the core, to the underlying truth of the story and break through to offer up O’Neill as he aspired to be, a poet of grand tragedy.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Alfredo Narciso & Lisa Joyce in "The Ugly One". Photo: Julieta Cervantes

An attractive face is a form of social currency, a fact attested to in fairy tales and regularly touted by modern-day scientific studies. German playwright Marius von Mayenburg’s The Ugly One, playing at SoHo Rep through February 26, mines the correlation between good looks and power, making the implicit explicit in an absurd drama that focuses—unconventionally, but refreshingly—on a man instead of a woman.

This bitter comedy, rife with social commentary, follows the fortunes of an unspeakably ugly man (Lette) who undergoes cosmetic surgery to get a new face. His new, extraordinarily handsome visage transforms his life: he is immediately successful at his work, and at conferences, queues of women fight to offer companionship after his presentations. Not all of the effects of this seismic change, however, are positive. Lette’s behavior shifts towards condescending entitlement, and as he becomes a poster child for the wonders of plastic surgery, his face is mass-produced, prompting all kinds of identity confusion.

There are lots of layers here, as many as the gauze bandages sported by patients post-surgery. The staging is spare, with an almost clinical feel, yet highly theatrical. Under the direction of Daniel Aukin, each of the four cast members deftly rotates between several roles, and the split-second flips between characters (youthful wife to aging mistress, boss to plastic surgeon) add a frisson to the action. The fishbowl, “I’m sizing you up” mentality is reflected in the audience/stage configuration, which places the stage between parallel sets of risers; I found myself periodically assessing the faces across from me.

By taking cosmetic surgery to fantastical extremes, Mayenburg teases the link between the external and internal, the impact of outward appearance on behavior, and the malleable understanding of “identity.” You laugh while you’re in the theater, but you walk out the door thinking.

[Postscript: Last week’s New Yorker includes a fascinating article on facial transplants as an extreme form of reconstructive surgery. In short, a victim of a terrible accident gets a new face. Eerily familiar.]

Popularity: 2% [?]

Beth Griffith, Mike Mikos, Joshua Modney and Kate Soper in You, My Mother (Photo by Prudence Katze)

Saturday afternoon took us to LaMama to see Two-Headed Calf‘s You, My Mother, the new opera project directed by Brooke O’Harra. The project explores the relationship between children (daughters) and their mothers, featuring two distinct halves – the first a collaboration between writer Kristen Kosmas and composer Rick Burkhardt, the second a collaboration between writer Karinne Keithley Syers and composer Brendan Connelly – both performed by acclaimed new music ensemble yarn|wire and a very talented cast of actor/singers.

I’m going to start by saying that, while I love LaMama dearly and You, My Mother is dedicated to its legendary spiritual and artistic mother, Ellen Stewart, I found myself wishing that this show was at The Kitchen, Issue Project Room or Roulette, if for no other reason than context.

I recently saw a workshop of Joe Diebes’ Botch at HERE and had similar thoughts – not that Botch should have been in another venue, but about context. Botch was a complex, multilayered sound piece with actors and objects that has been generally positioned as theater – but I thought back to Robert Ashley‘s opera That Morning Thing presented at The Kitchen as part of Performa11, and realized that Diebes’ piece would benefit by situating itself as opera. What it is investigating in terms of sound, staging and effect references the traditions of opera more than text-based theater, and while it fits comfortably in either world, an adventurous new music audience might have more access points. And the frame of “opera” might allow the piece to be heard in a different way, rather than being constrained by a theater-goer’s instinct to seek textual meaning or familiar modes of interpersonal interaction.

You, My Mother is clearly opera and The Ellen Stewart Theater at LaMama imbued the piece with a certain emotional and aesthetic resonance. The theater is spacious and grand and fairly emanates its history. The musicians and performers were arranged on the stage in such a way that the show felt both intimate and spectacular. The single nod towards multimedia – slide projectors – worked really well with the staging, music and lighting to create an atmosphere conducive to the dreamlike unfolding of fractured and disputed memories that comprised the performance. But I found myself wondering if this piece would benefit from being in a space more known for contemporary music and experimental literature. I felt simultaneously thrilled that I was seeing what I think is really important work, while feeling worried/frustrated that because it is happening in the context of “downtown theater” it is not going to be seen or appreciated by a wider audience. I may be – and hope – I’m wrong, because You, My Mother is a really wonderful and rewarding work.

This is an auspicious moment for new music in New York City – there is almost a glut of cutting-edge contemporary opera and art music that builds on modern music of the 20th century while embracing tonality and pop music tropes. There are collaborations between composers and video artists and musicians and performers that are causing quite a stir – from Nico Muhly to Merrill Garbus to Judd Greenstein’s New Amsterdam label and Ecstatic Music Festival, etc. etc. On any given night at LPR alone you can listen to amazing, groundbreaking new music. But, in my limited experience, the text is frequently subpar, or at least not as good as the music. Also, in my limited experience, I haven’t found so much new music that was emotionally complex and evocative – perhaps because of the limitations of the text, perhaps because of an infatuation with technology and overwhelming video, perhaps because. It might also be related to that certain aloofness that comes from being “avant-garde” in New York, that we’ve inherited from the now-legendary groundbreaking downtown artists for the 60′s through the 80′s.

You, My Mother inhabits an interesting place in the arc of avant-garde NYC. It feels both new and old, both contemporary and historical. The construction of the work itself feels handmade. As far as I can tell, the yarn|wire ensemble works almost exclusively with actual instruments and found objects, not a synthesizer, laptop or sampler in sight. And the use of archaic technology such as the slide projectors established a feeling of unearthed histories, of memories discovered in a shoebox in the back of a closet in your childhood home.

Both Kosmas and Syers are extraordinary writers who share a common fascination with the magic immanent in the mundane, domestic and vernacular. They possess a similar gaze, but each approaches the material differently way, with their own distinct voice. Kosmas is the interrogator of small moments; she finds casual phrases, tossed off words and brief glances, casts a light on them, frames them, makes them resonate with extraordinary profundity.  She is a poet of notes left behind on scraps of paper; of impenetrable, heartbreaking miscommunications, a collector of the overlooked.

Syers, too, excavates small, easily-overlooked moments, but her voice is at once more interior and expansive, seemingly drawing from the unconscious and making connections between disparate and unlike things. She brings in animals and dreams, takes us into imaginary, frequently playful landscapes, though her words are the last of the show and she leaves us with the haunting sentiment, “I wanted to say so much more, but thinking of you makes me quiet.” [that is how I wrote it in my notes, it may not be the exact quote].

Rick Burkhardt is a fascinating composer, I first saw his work when the Nonsense Company debuted in New York with Great Hymn of Thanksgiving/Conversation Storm, where he used prepared instruments, found objects and spoken text to great effect. In You, My Mother, Burkhardt’s composition is similarly percussive and yarn|wire performs with energy and precision. The voices of the actors, alternating between sung and spoken text, hover over and between the instrumentation, creating phrases, punctuation and scenes that support and reveal Kosmas’ text. The overarching device is the slide show, most of which consists not of images but of descriptions: “a relative’s birthday party”, “a wedding”, “a child’s shoulder blades”. The slides are evocative in their absence of discrete representation, they are the idea of a slide show, conveying a kind of sadness while acknowledging the simultaneous singularity of family memory and the universality of those same pictures.

Kosmas focuses very much on the process of individuation and deconstruction – what does it mean to become an adult? Who are we searching for when the iconic Mother no longer holds up and we seek to see her as she is, flaws and all? How do we forgive our mothers for being human, flawed and messy when we would have them be perfect, ever-loving and constant? A funny scene occurs when the daughter, Helen, tries to tell her mother that she is sad, depressed, alone, confused. She speaks, elliptically, of her mother pressing buttons, and we soon realize that they are talking to each other through an intercom from separate sides of the house. Helen tries to instruct her mother on how to use the intercom, until the mother finally asks her to come. A slide flashes on the screen, “Helen walks three miles”  [once again, faulty memory on my part, this may not be an accurate quote] and the musicians clomp a pair of shoes on a board for a full minute or more as Helen sullenly walks. The mother says, “There’s something about the way your father built this house”. She is referring to the physical house but it is obvious that there is something wrong with the family’s psychological house, the absent father, the inability to communicate.

The interplay between Burkhardt’s score and Kosmas’ words is intricate and skillful – they have complementary senses of rhythm, spacing and tone. And just as Kosmas seeks meaning in the everyday, Burkhardt relies not only on musical instruments but quotidian objects – a mixing bowl, a pair of shoes, a handcrank.

Brendan Connelly, along with Brooke O’Harra, is a founder of Two Headed Calf and his composition is a hallmark of the company’s work. Over the years he has accessed a remarkable range of styles, instrumentation and ideas; each production has its own unique score that frequently reflects the subject matter, but maintains a certain voice that is distinctly his own. In this show, Connelly’s score seems a bit more overtly musical, somewhat less percussive and dissonant than in previous work. Once again, the music is deeply integrated with the words, they set them off and frame them, provide support and elucidation, drama and emotion. Syers’ divides the piece into five sequences, each named after an animal but for the final one, entitled “dawn”. Connelly and Syers strike a tone that is sometimes wistful and sometimes amused, even moving from playful to poignant within the same sequence.

I don’t know the exact nature of Two Headed Calf’s collaborative process, but I am assuming that it was very close for both pairs of creators. Holding the whole thing together is O’Harra’s deft direction. She recently became a mother and I can only imagine that this influenced the process in some way. I’ve seen a number of Brooke’s shows over the years and they are often characterized by a certain frenzied energy and over-the-top theatricality. While You, My Mother is still very theatrical – there are animal masks and surreal costumes – the show comes across as a bit more measured and mature. The staging is simple and thoughtful, the actors move with energy and precision but never wander near the chaos and spectacle of earlier works. The performances are bigger than life but still nuanced and very controlled, there is a lot of room, not just space on the stage but within the work itself. Room for the actors to really inhabit the roles and room for the audience to both receive the staged work and project their personal experience into it.

The ensemble - Beth Griffith, Laryssa Husiak, Mike Mikos and Kate Soper – give strong performances across the board. Even though not all of them are trained singers, the music seems to work to each of their strengths. They managed to balance the singing duties (with some pretty challenging music) with intricate choreography and solid acting. The same ensemble of actors and musicians performs both pieces and that continuity works in the favor of the project overall. It feels whole, a two-part reflection, a diptych if you will, on the universal mother and the mother in particular, singular and human.

Simply put, I really enjoyed and appreciated the show. I found it very moving, insightful and emotionally rich while still being aesthetically and artistically adventurous and challenging. Kosmas and Syers are not darlings of the experimental literature set – I’m not sure who is – but they are doing important work that merits more visibility. So too with Connelly and Burkhardt. I know a lot less about the world of new music, but I know yarn|wire a bit, and know that they are well-regarded and work with really talented people. I’m not sure how Burkhardt and Connelly position themselves in relationship to the wider new music scene in New York, but I hope that this work is recognized by other artists and composers exploring the genre.

You, My Mother continues at LaMama through February 20th – catch it while you can.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I don’t remember when I first saw Julia May Jonas’s company Nellie Tinder, but I do remember one evening at University Settlement where she presented an excerpt of a dance-theater piece with a live guitarist that was a wonderful blend of humor, choreography and theater. Ever since I’ve tried to make an effort to see what she’s doing and the upcoming Evelyn at Bushwick Starr looks to be a real milestone for this talented writer/director. For this outing she is working with some great collaborators, a veritable “who’s who” of downtown talent, in different capacities – Jon Lundbom, Ryan Holsopple, Jennie MaryTai Liu, Normandy Raven Sherwood, Jess Barbagallo and Andrew Dinwiddie. Looks to be good!

The show is described as “a musical fever-dream” and “…an idiosyncratic genre mash-up and a haunting yet humorously parodic love letter to things past.”

There’s a good preview article on the show over at The Brooklyn Rail.

and here’s a preview video:

Evelyn Trailer from Julia May Jonas on Vimeo.

NELLIE TINDER
EVELYN
FEBRUARY 22-MARCH 10
Wednesdays-Saturdays, 8pm
at the Bushwick Starr
Preview Feb. 21 ($10)
$15

Popularity: 3% [?]

A week after seeing a preview performance of Einstein on the Beach and there’s still this feeling of having taken a trip to a 1976 sci-fi time capsule. An operatic spaceship. It was a four-hour train ride from Chicago to the Power Center at the University of Michigan, a venue that in mid-January was home to epic rehearsals of the show. “There’s no doubt about it,” wrote the University Musical Society in fervent pre-show emails. “This is a seriously historic moment.” Historic, yes, but like visiting a sepia-colored dream of some NASA engineer–after a particularly long day pushing buttons in big glasses and a comb-over. Smart, beautiful, disorienting, dated.

A lot of that has to do with the set. The biggest pieces roll onstage in grey plywood slabs, from the wings, with haze and smoke billowing out around them. Prison bars made of ribbons dangle from the battens and billow slightly from the gust of passing performers. Most of the color is flat shades of white, black and grey, with very little blending, and even when we are presented with the representation of an actual building, there’s no attempt to, say, carve a faux stone façade from Styrofoam. We’re very obviously looking at a painted backdrop. Even a giant wall of chasing light bulbs is literally made of old-school yellow globes, not something more modern like LEDs. And yet, that the setting looks like it came out of a Theater History Textbook contributes to its other-worldliness, and its modern meaning.

The scenic accuracy is deliberate. It’s been 20 years since the last re-staging of Einstein on the Beach. There was one in 1984, and again in 1992, when I was 5 and 13, respectively. Creators Robert Wilson, Phillip Glass and Lucinda Childs collaborated to ensure the creation of an accurate re-staging of the original. The work has been the subject of a PBS documentary and is said to have changed perception of modern opera.

This is clear from the production in a number of ways. That the endurance required from the performers is astounding. That aspects of its composition seem tired at this point, having been aggressively adopted into modern opera. That the whole piece is basically a 4.5 hour mental workout, demanding that you stay engaged while challenging you with endless looping chants of numbers, non-narrative speeches, robotic gestures, and straight-out goofiness.

In one of the strongest sequences of the piece, featured performer Kate Moran repeats a line describing an experience in a supermarket: “There were these bathing caps you could buy that had these kind of Fourth of July plumes on them,” while slowly moving through space, changing costumes. In the original production, Childs was the featured performer who recited these lines on loop. In this production, Moran owns the text. I never got tired of hearing those lines–with every repetition, the inflection and meaning would change. Sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically, always engaging.

The same is true, to a certain extent, of Glass’ music, in which choruses sing numbers that blend into sentences and words. It’s a little bit like listening to a kaleidoscope. The chorus sings from the pit, from a jury box onstage, in amorphous groups. Everyone wears suspenders, a white dress shirt, and slacks—an outfit stereotypical for Einstein and absolutely ridiculous for anyone else.

So here I am, sitting in a theater of a marathon length of time, watching a work with sets that look like they came out of a vault, everyone’s wearing suspenders and singing numbers, and the lead violinist is actually dressed like Einstein. People are puffing their cheeks out and reciting nonsensical phrases. There is a court scene. There is a caboose scene. There are several dance sequences. There is a visual theme of a bright white line. And all throughout, people are getting up to go to the bathroom as is necessary, because there isn’t any intermission.

It feels both glorious and totally insane—like a dream.

Which is kind of the point. In the PBS documentary, Wilson speaks of the work as depicting character, not narrative. Glass talks about trusting visual and psychological associations with Einstein as a basis for the work. Both acknowledge the German physicist as a powerful, almost godlike presence in their culture. With this devoted re-staging of Einstein on the Beach, Glass and Wilson claim their own territory within the word “godlike,” and the production celebrates not Einstein but the machinations and developments of its lead artists.

With just cause. Ever watch an old movie and think “Well, this is kind of cliché,” and then realize “Wait a minute—this is the thing that MADE the clichés”? That’s what watching Einstein on the Beach is like, for some of us who didn’t grow up in the atomic age, but are instead living in its hangover. For some of us who are familiar with the visual machinations of contemporary opera. For some of us who read about Wilson in our college textbooks and have seen Phillip Glass become the subject of sketch comedy. It comes with a kind of smirking respect. Like when you’re grateful for the incredible sacrifice your grandparents made but wish they’d stop talking about themselves at the dinner table.

So if coming back from this opera is like emerging from a 1976 Time Spaceship, it’s worth the trip, if only to appreciate the contributions of works past and the developments in the field since then. Makes you want to kiss the ground. A little.

Popularity: unranked [?]