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A CurtainUp Review
A Sampling From the 2012 Under The Radar Festival
By Deirdre Donovan and William Coyle
The Public Theater's annual Under the Radar Festival is once again playing at several venues. And once again we did a pick and chose a sampling from this provocative mix of productions running for just a short time. While the Festival is an extremely short run, several shows are on for post-UTR runs two of which, Gob Squad Kitchen and Chimera are included in our coverage. Events at The Public are $20 ($15 for members). Tickets at partner venues are $20-$25F For details about the entire Festival: http://www.publictheater.org/component/option,com_shows/task,view/Itemid,141/id,944
Shows Reviewed : Chimera--beyond UTR run | Sontag Reborn | Goodbar | |The Table | Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and the Farewell Speech
January 23rd Addition: Gob Squad's Kitchen (You've Never Had It So Good)
Gob Squad’s Kitchen -- Post Festival Review
Gob Squad is back! And for the second time this year the German/British collective turns up trumps with their compelling performance piece at the Public Theater. The troupe (Sarah Thom, Sharon Smith, Nina Tecklenbburg, and Sean Patten) have used one work of art (Andy Warhol’s classic film The Kitchen) to create another in which audience members become the stars of the show.
When my Curtain Up colleague William Coyle reviewed Gob Squad’s Kitchen at last year’s Under the Radar Festival ( Wlliam's review )<, he praised it highly--and for good reason! The show serves up a rich stew of Warhol’s world circa 1965. Though reconstructing The Kitchen is the meat and potatoes of the evening, the troupe joyously meddles with his other films: Sleep, Eat, and The Kiss. All is ingeniously projected on 3 large screens on stage or evoked through live performance. This group is well-known for exploring “the point where theater meets art and media. Witnessing their artistry is downright surreal.
The Gob Squad’s achievement is to have preserved the mystique of Andy Warhol while going all-out for art in the here and now. During the presentation, the troupe invites you to take a trip back to the underground cinemas of New York City and look the celluloid beast in the eye. Indeed, it forces you to reflect on the very nature of authenticity and the revolutionary spirit that infused all of Warhol’s art.
Both playful and profound, funny and serious, the show keeps one in a constant state of astonishment. And while the foursome take liberties with the original scenarios and pepper in future realities, such as referring to “AIDS being around the corner,” they are justified by history and Warhol’s modern urban vision.
If you are wary of shows that include audience participation, there’s no need to panic here. The principals don’t press reluctant audience members to go on stage (Yours truly said no when Gob Squader Sean Patten stopped at my aisle and asked me if I was ready for my close-up). But whether you are part of the theatrical action or not, anybody who goes to this show won’t forget it. The Gob Squad strikes a note of authentic feeling, time and again, in this mediated experience as they train their cameras on those audience members willing to claim their fifteen minutes of fame. In this hot-house world, they offer a genuine taste of art, humor, and Warhol’s inimitable magic. The troupe is only in New York for a brief run (through February 9). So catch it now—or catch it never.
Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good)
Directed by Gob Squad
Cast members performing on January 21, 2012: Sarah Thom, Sharon Smith, Nina Tecklenburg, Sean Patten.
The Public Theater at The Newman Theater Space, 425 Lafayette Street, New York City.
Tickets: $60-$70 at 212/967-7555
From 1/19/12; opening 1/23/12; closing 2/09/12.
Wednesday through Saturday @ 8pm; Saturday and Sunday @ 2pm; Sundays @ 7pm. There is an additional performance on Tuesday, January 31 @ 7pm.
Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes with no intermission
Reviewed by Deirdre Donovan based on press performance of 1/21/12
Chimera
What is a woman? Is she merely her DNA? Inspired by a real-life horror story, Chimera is performed and created by Suli Holum (with co-creator Deborah Stein). It's incredibly riveting and raises ethical questions that pushes you to the frontiers of modern science.
During the course of 70-minutes, Holum inhabits 3 speaking characters: a distinguished microbiologist Jennifer Samuels, her nerdy son, and a feisty narrator. But what you see on the surface is hardly the reality here. For starters, the narrator may well be the twin sister Jennifer swallowed pre-natally. And if that makes you feel like reaching for the pepto bismol, it’s perfectly okay. The character Jennifer suffers from severe bouts of nausea during the evening. And though nothing is said about what triggers her digestive problem, it’s not a stretch to say it has psychosomatic origins — or, to put it in slightly different parlance, perhaps it’s her survivor’s guilt playing out in real time.
The intriguing title refers to the genetic condition that Jennifer was diagnosed with (the biological phenomenon of having two sets of chromosomes) and the mythological creature comprised of diverse animal parts. Holum and Stein fuse science and mythology to cleverly point up the predicament of a Midwestern woman with a rare genetic condition.
Chimera is alternately sad and funny and a solid production with set design by Jeremy Wilhelm, video design by Kate Freer and David Tennent.
Holum is perfectly cast as the intelligent microbiologist and mother. She employs a Midwestern twang for her trio of characters, and she’s terrific at shifting personas and breaking through the “fourth wall.”
What might first appear to be sensational material is surprisingly transformed into a poignant piece of theater which also reminds you of the fundamental camaraderie of theater, that happy exchange between the performer and the audience with Holum ready to do anything and everything for you from the moment she walks on stage, in fact, she establishes herself as the perfect hostess (“Would anybody like a cup of coffee?”). And she occasionally will leave the stage and sit with the audience, giving the piece a wonderfully intimate feel. But this is far more than a coffee klatch in a meticulous Midwestern kitchen. Indeed, Chimera will make you reconsider the very definition of a person.
Chimera
Presented by HERE, 145 6th Avenue.
Remaining festival performances are January 14 and January 15; performances continue after UTR festival through January 28.
Running time: 70 minutes with no intermission
Reviewed by Deirdre Donovan based on press performance of 1/11/12
Gob Squad’s Kitchen
|
In 100 years time people will look at this and they’ll say, that’s why.--.— The Gob Squad
|
When my Curtain Up colleague William Coyle reviewed Gob Squad’s Kitchen at last year’s Under the Radar Festival, he praised it highly--and for good reason! The show serves up a rich stew of Warhol’s world circa 1965. Though reconstructing The Kitchen is the meat and potatoes of the evening, the troupe joyously meddles with his other films: Sleep, Eat, and The Kiss. All is ingeniously projected on 3 large screens on stage or evoked through live performance. This group is well-known for exploring “the point where theater meets art and media. And witnessing their artistry is downright surreal.
The Gob Squad’s achievement is to have preserved the mystique of Andy Warhol while going all-out for art in the here and now. During the presentation, the troupe invites you to take a trip back to the underground cinemas of New York City, and look the celluloid beast in the eye. Indeed, it forces you to reflect on the very nature of authenticity and the revolutionary spirit that infused all of Warhol’s art. Both playful and profound, funny and serious, the show keeps one in a constant state of astonishment. And while the foursome take liberties with the original scenarios and pepper in future realities, such as referring to “AIDS being around the corner,” they are justified by history and Warhol’s modern urban vision.
If you are wary of shows that include audience participation, there’s no need to panic here. The principals don’t press reluctant audience members to go on stage (Yours truly said no when Gob Squader Sean Patten stopped at my aisle and asked me if I was ready for my close-up). But whether you are part of the theatrical action, or not, anybody who goes to this show won’t forget it. The Gob Squad strikes a note of authentic feeling, time and again, in this mediated experience as they train their cameras on those audience members willing to claim their fifteen minutes of fame.
In this hot-house world, the Gob Squad offers a genuine taste of art, humor, and Warhol’s inimitable magic. This internationally-renowned troupe is only in New York for a brief run (through February 9). So catch it now—or catch it never.
Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good)
Directed by Gob Squad
Cast members performing on January 21, 2012: Sarah Thom, Sharon Smith, Nina Tecklenburg, Sean Patten.
The Public Theater at The Newman Theater Space, 425 Lafayette Street, New York City. Tickets: $60-$70, can be purchased by calling 212/967-7555
From 1/19/12; opening 1/23/12; closing 2/09/12.
Wednesday through Saturday @ 8pm; Saturday and Sunday @ 2pm; Sundays @ 7pm. There is an additional performance on Tuesday, January 31 @ 7pm.
Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes with no intermission
Reviewed by Deirdre Donovan based on press performance of 1/21/12 Sontag: Reborn
Sontag: Reborn is an absorbing journey through Sontag-land. Based on the first volume of Susan Sontag’s journals, this solo-play gives you a candid portrait of the celebrity as a young woman. It takes you through her salad days, the brief season of her marriage and family life, and fleeting glimpses of her later cultural achievements.
True, it’s tricky to dramatize writing or writers on the stage. And some no doubt will argue that reading Sontag’s actual journals would be more satisfying (and certainly cheaper!) than seeing this 80-minute adaptation. But, frankly, part of the appeal of Sontag: Reborn is that somebody else has already taken the time to read through her journals, digested them, and now enables you to enjoy them in a more expressive form.
Director Marianne Weems and actor-adapter Moe Angelos attempt to capture the aura of Sontag’s mind. Angelos, impersonating Sontag, pens and recites journal entries, and also interacts with a video projection of an older version of Sontag. The savvy festival-goer sitting next to me told me that the video of the older Sontag was in fact a pre-recorded video of the same actress; also that the videos one sees of Sontag penning her journals, which remarkably synchronize with the live performance, are the result of much innovation and high-tech experimentation.
Beyond the high-tech wizardry (video design by Austin Switzer), the best thing about the presentation is that it allows you to actually listen to Sontag take issue with herself. Her views on crucial issues evolved over the decades, and the disparity between the younger and older intellectual is often evident here. Equally interesting, you witness this woman writer as she, unapologetically, appropriates the alone-time that all writers need.
Much like a Sontag essay the show piles idea upon idea, each insight building on all the previous ones. Although this may sound like a somewhat boring theatrical experience, it’s not. Granted there is one scene when Angelos’s Sontag gives us an exhaustive litany of works that she is intent on mastering. But just when you think that Angelos has out-Sontagged Sontag, she wisely breaks the pedagogic tone with a moment of pure exasperation: “I cannot think this fast—rather I cannot change this fast.” It’s such moments that anchor this piece and make it emotionally honest.
If you are a Sontag enthusiast, there will be few epiphanies here. But if you come more out of an earnest curiosity about this historical personage, then this show will be an eye-opener. Sontag, who was bisexual, had lesbian affairs. And during the show, you will learn about her failed marriage to Philip Rieff, her once-strained relationship with her son, and her angst with her lesbian lovers.
The production is smartly designed byJoshua Higgason, incisively directed by Marianne Weems, and convincingly acted by Moe Angelos. The slight dust of age that now powders Sontag’s achievements is superbly brushed away here, thanks to these creative souls.
Sontag Reborn, based on the book by Susan Sontag, edited by David Rieff
Directed by Marianne Weem
Adapted and performed by Moe Angelos
Sound by Dan Dobson
Video by Austin Switser
Sets by Joshua Higgason
Lighting by Laura Mroczkowski
Costumes by Andreea Mincic
Makeup by Dick Page
Stage manager, Ms. Mroczkowski
January 8 through January 15
Running time: 80 minutes with no intermission
Reviewed by Deirdre Donovan at 1/04/12 press performance.
Goodbar
To the curious and adventurous festival-goer I recommend Goodbar, created by the band Bambi and the theater troupe Waterwell. Based on Judith Rossner’s 1975 novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar this staged concert goes heavy on the music and light on the narrative. It may be a bit loud to the ears (ear plugs are handed to you as you enter the theater), but it is worth your rapt if bewildered attention.
The performance is not conventional in any sense, but is a danced and sung through concert of linked musical numbers inspired from passages of Rossner’s novel. Everything is wildly cranked up to the nth degree, and all the performers are dressed in glam-rock style (costumes by Erik Bergrin). The retro set (set design by Nick Benacerraf) evokes a 70s bar with disco floor, glaring hot lights (lighting by Adam Frank), all dominated by a giant video screen (video by Alex Koch) where you will see a nightmare come to life.
The story is told as a flashback with a surreal feel throughout. A naked light bulb swinging back and forth on the screen in pendulum fashion. Just as you become mesmerized by its motion, you are shocked back to full consciousness again to hear the disembodied voice of a rapist-murderer recounting his horrific crime. His victim is the story’s protagonist Theresa (Hanna Cheek), a dedicated schoolteacher who becomes entangled in the singles-bar scene, and meets her sorry fate when her last pick-up turns out to be Mr. Dead Wrong.
Unfortunately, you won’t get all the pieces of Rossner’s story here. But its sang-froid quality is intact, and the song “Dogs on the Dance Floor” drives home the perverse idea that it is after all a dog-eat-dog world. Perhaps seeing this show may serve as an introduction to the novel, or as a kind of prologue to the later 1977 film adaptation with Diane Keaton and Richard Gere.
The production is well staged byArian Moayed and Tom Ridgley. If it's to be faulted it's that the blatant coarseness of the material is stressed and sustained without letup. Nobody’s wounds are healed here nor is there a moral. Somehow Goodbar is far more powerful for its absence.! Its tragic denouement recalls Frank Wedekind’s classic Lulu in which the prostitute Lulu is murdered by Jack the Ripper. Though Theresa’s murderer is far less famous, he’s just as deadly.
The cast—Hanna Cheek, Cara Jeiven, Jimmie Marlowe, Tobi Parks and Kevin Townley—execute each detail of their roles with great scrupulosity. The additional dancers—Meredith Fages, Kelly Hurt, Aleta Lanier and Sara Pauley—give fresh meaning to the phrase "dance of death." And a big shout out to the live band on stage. Nobody but nobody is miscast in this razor-sharp show.
In spite of its pathological sex and violence Goodbar reminds you that a new world always begins as a wreck or wasteland. In his poem “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats may have anticipated this music theater piece with these lines: "Turning,and turning in the widening gyre,/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/ Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”
Goodbar created by Bambï and Waterwell, based on the novel “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” by Judith Rossner
Directed by Arian Moayed and Tom Ridgely
Cast: Hanna Cheek, Cara Jeiven, Jimmie Marlowe, Tobi Parks and Kevin Townley
Music by Jimmie Marlowe, lyrics by Kevin Townley
Video by Alex Koch
Sets by Nick Benacerraf
Costumes by Erik Bergrin
Sound by Gaby Savransky
Makeup by Bec Fordyce
Lighting by Adam Frank
Additional choreography by Monica Bill Barnes and Anna Bass
Dancing by Meredith Fages, Kelly Hurt, Aleta Lanier and Sara PauleyStage manager, Michelle Scalpone. Through Jan. 14.
Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes, without intermission.> Reviewed by Deirdre Donovan based on press performance of 1/05/12
The Table
What do you get when you mix the Bible, Beckett, and Ikea together? You get The Table, an amazing piece of theater from Britain’s Blind Summit Theatre. With only a table for a stage, a trio of men (Mark Down, Nick Barnes, and Sean Garratt) maneuvers a bunraku puppet across a rectangular table top, and bring him to cantankerous life before your eyes.
The scenario is the stuff of absurdity. A tiny puppet wants to tell the story of “Moses” on a table, but each time he tries to start, he has an existential crisis. Determined to fathom his situation, the puppet proceeds to ask some soul-searching questions (“How did I get here?,” “Why can’t I get off?,” and “Who is that woman sitting at the other end of the table?”). Much like a Beckett hero, this cardboard-and-cloth puppet is stuck in a godforsaken place. Yes, you may laugh at this puppet’s ridiculous dilemma but before long, you will laugh less, and think more.
There are so many dramatic turns (and I mean that literally!) that transpire on this table-top. And it’s intriguing to watch the three-man team manipulate the puppet from corner to corner, and from here to there.
You witness the puppet as he walks on an invisible treadmill, goes through a fake tsunami, and then encounters a real woman (Sarah Calver) who comes and goes as she pleases from the table. Pure injustice! Worse, the puppet soon learns that she is his wife.
There are also mysterious things lying beneath the surface for this puppet has a smack of Moses in him. And like the old patriarch who wandered 40 years through the desert before dying in sight of the Promised Land, the puppet fears that this table will be his tomb, and that his “Moses” story will never be told. Say what you will, it all taps into some very deep psychological terrain.
There is a second piece following the “Moses” puppet show, which serves as a coda to the evening. Here the three men create a cartoon satire of a movie, with mere scraps of paper pulled out of a suitcase. With classical music swelling in the background, it’s a real hat trick!
Indeed, the entire show is as exhilirating as discovering fresh manna in the desert. Too bad The Table hasd such a brief run so that I can't urge you to go and see it.
The Table
Presented at La MaMa ETC, 74A E. Fourth St. Last performance Sunday, January 8.
Running time: 60 minutes with no intermission
Reviewed by Deirdre Donovan based on press performance of 1/05/12
Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and the Farewell Speech
| “But, see, there’s one thing I find problematic you see, normally the people who are co-workers at the company take on the organizing of a farewell party, I think, and I just feel like the fact that we, the three of us temps ended up being the ones to organize Erika’s party is wrong you know, normally the people who are co-workers at the company take on the organizing of a farewell party, I think, and it’s not at all like we don’t wish Erika well or that we don’t want to do anything like that, but, I just think the role of organizing a farewell party ought to be the responsibility of full-time company employees……”— Temp Worker # 3, “Hot Pepper” |
Fortunately, each succeeding mini-play is better than the preceding one. In “Hot Pepper,” three temporary office workers struggle neurotically with plans for the farewell party of a full-time colleague, Erika. At the performance I attended, the audience nervously forced their laughs, almost as if much of the super-titled humor had been lost in translation. But, in the second work, “Air Conditioner,” the laughs were genuine.
In “Air Conditioner,” a young woman and her male colleague speculate about who is turning the office thermostat down to 23 degrees centigrade, a temperature (about 74 degrees Fahrenheit) that the woman somehow finds unbearably cold. Through awkward and goofy motions, they get physically closer and wonder whether she should call the police on the culprit.
In the final and best work, “Farewell Speech,” Okada revisits Erika, the subject of “Hot Pepper.” Erika begins to thank her co-workers, but quickly goes off on a major tangent, explaining how she accidentally stepped on a dying cicada on her doorstep that morning. Her colleagues stand passively, smiling respectfully, as she repeats her dialogue and physical movements, taking them far beyond the typical farewell speech.
Sets are spare and antiseptic. The occasionally psychedelic lighting by Tomomi Ohira and Naoko Ito lends a hint of the surreal to the repetitive dialogue, and Ayumu Okubo’s selection of free form jazz and shoegaze adds a deliberate level of monotony to the dialogue.
The problem with all three mini-plays is that their gags go on for too long and the works teeter on the boring. While Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and The Farewell Speech is uneven, Mr. Okada and his chelfitsch theater company should be commended for their unique form of theater. At its best it shows us not only the paralysis of over-analysis, but also the hidden and painful personal worlds that we sometimes choose to hide with mundane words and actions.
Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech performances are at Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street www.japansociety.org from January 5 to January 14th
Cast: Taichi Yamagata, Riki Takeda, Mari Ando, Kei Namba, Saho Ito, Fumie Yokoo
Translation: Aya Ogawa
Lighting Design: Tomomi Ohira, Naoko Ito
Sound Design: Ayumu Okubo
Stage Manager: So Ozaki
Running Time: 75 minutes, no intermission
Reviewed by William Coyle, based on 1/5 performance
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