THE AMERICAN LIVING ROOM FESTIVAL @ HERE
by Dustin Stephens
July
27 & 28:
"Jim
Train"
"talc"
"Loop-the-Loop!"
Despite the malnourished state and
concomitant bloating of theater in Manhattan, Soho’s HERE Arts Center continues to
actively promote innovative works by emerging artists.
This year’s 11th edition of The American Living Room
festival was no exception, involving approximately 1,000 artists over a nine-week period
before mostly sold-out audiences. I
was fortunate enough to catch three pieces in the middle of the festival, July 27 and 28.
Starting the evening was Anna D’Agrosa’s slick Jim Train, inspired
by an A. M. Homes short story. Though
admirably directed, variably insightful, and graced with hilarious, talented actors
(especially Gabe Silva’s sharp, albeit under-rehearsed, turn as the eponymous
protagonist), Jim Train failed to explore anything that wasn’t more
thoroughly—if not more articulately—explicated in last year’s American
Beauty, or the year before that’s Happiness, or the year before that
year’s The Ice Storm. Though
interesting, reliably funny, and hell, even socially relevant in this day and age, the
identity crisis of Suburban Man is staler than last week’s Wonder Bread. But wait! you say, this is theater—“experimental
theater”—and those were all movies—“films”—so
isn’t that distinction enough? Well, no,
and less than ironically, fully half of the fifty-plus minutes of Jim Train occurred
as a big-screen projection of super-8 footage. Though
entertaining, sincere, and honestly moving, Jim Train is a classic example of
several talented, if incongruent, artists collaborating on a project that was simply not
that interesting from the get-go.
With the show’s second piece, the evening truly began to crystallize. Though almost cruelly short at twenty-three
minutes, playwright Cameron Cobb’s wordless talc provided both a look at what
puppets do when left alone as well as the artistic high point of the evening. Aided by near-perfect casting, notably Jesse Erbel
as the ventriloquist’s dummy, Amy Acker as the bunraku, and Martin Verni as the
quasi-protagonistic marionette, talc succeeds through flawless characterization and
director Zenobia Taylor’s talent with sincere movement and detail. For good measure, Daniel Hart’s original
score arrested the audience’s attention in spots where the narrative slowed, and his
contribution by itself would have justified the evening’s $12 admission price.
Director Taylor, just 23, is a Texas native better known for her post-modern
choreography, which has appeared at the Jacob’s Pillow dance festival, the American
Dance Festival, and Context Studios in the East Village.
Her experimentation with a more narrative-based style, though still choreographic,
appeared entirely natural. “It felt a
little strange to direct someone else’s work,” said Taylor, “but it worked
out in the end, primarily thanks to the amazing cast I was able to put together for this
show.”
Witnessed through staggeringly dark, handheld front-lighting and Hart’s moody,
hypnotic accompaniment of viola, violin, alto sax, and guitar, a marionette discovers
consciousness, falls into tortured, unrequited love with a naïve bunraku. Then, at
the behest of two malevolent, incestuous sibling handpuppets, he uses his own loathed
strings to strangle his romantic rival (Erbel’s deft take as ventriloquist’s
dummy). The tragedy only deepens from here. Though narratively simple, roughly—and
intentionally—on the level of a children’s fable, the piece drew complexity more
from what isn’t there than what is, insinuating that everything important was well
beneath the surface. Yet despite its
oppressive melancholy, talc murmured with the possibility of redemption.
On the most superficial level, the marionette is tortured by the dummy’s
diabolical panache; beneath this, he also suffers abuse from the handpuppets, physical
manifestations of his conflicting subconscious. There
seems to be admirably little risk of over-analyzing this piece, for Taylor’s
direction seems as methodical as it is neurotically fastidious. It cannot be coincidence, then, that as with
schizophrenia, no character notices the presence of the
acerbic handpuppets but the marionette; similarly, only one scene reverses the thematic
lighting of blue/marionette and red/bunraku: the solitary relief in this grim tale, the
marionette’s brief romance with the bunraku, which is quickly shattered by the
menacing handpuppets. Enraged that the
marionette has escaped his strings, the twins return him to the indelible prison of his
identity, whilst the dummy impales the bunraku with her own controlling dowels.
Counter-intuitively, then, the bunraku herself personifies the marionette’s
truest menace: his insurmountable inferiority. Try
as he might, he remains only a refreshing curiosity to the wide-eyed bunraku, who requires
strength for stabilization, not adoration—any strength unfortunately, even
that of the malevolent dummy. The
handpuppets, so superficially evil, merely remind the marionette of his place in
the world, leading him where his subconscious has already pre-ordained. At this level, the sudden and apparently
meaningless tragedy of the bunraku’s death, accidentally choked in the
marionette’s suddenly murderous strings just after the dummy’s demise, is just
as much a liberating sacrifice as it is a merely heart-rending loss. The uniquely bright lighting of the final scene,
with the handpuppets leading the blank-faced marionette towards a split, still far-off
destiny, is neither completely tragic nor wholly gratifying. Nor is it didactic in the least; it is simply a
stark revelation of what exists: a newly autonomous individual, liberated through great
personal loss from the strings—both physical and psychological—that keep the
freedom we chase always one insurmountable step ahead, forever preventing us from enjoying
what freedoms we already have. In short, the
marionette has come to realize that even freedom itself is just another set of
restrictions. Taylor’s pedantic
touch—coupled with Cobb’s delicate story—paid off handily in the end; as
allegory, talc is an amazing piece of dance/theater/whatever and easily one of the
festival’s best.
The final piece, Jeffrey Baker’s Loop-the-Loop!, was clearly the
night’s most crowd-pleasing offering. Notable
for its all-male, largely half-naked, and romantically charged atmosphere, the work
succeeded in presenting themes mysteriously lacking in the mainstream New York theater, or
at least lacking in respect (even those as supposedly “underground” as Here,
which affords its surely astronomical rent largely through funding from NBC). This piece, first and foremost, insisted male
homosexual themes be taken seriously. To a
large degree, it succeeded, as a great deal of the actual writing (much of which was
lifted from Gore Vidal) in this piece was trenchant, insightful, and emotionally dead-on.
Nonetheless, parts of Loop-the-Loop! fell victim to an understated
compromise: sacrificing the strength of its own writing for kitschy, albeit popular
“gay-man” standby’s such as shrill cross-dressing musical numbers and
overly familiar queeny stereotypes. When the
crowd—squirming uncomfortably in their seats just one scene earlier when Baker’s
protagonist and Rhett Kalman’s the Writer wrestled, kissed, and romanced in their
underwear—broke into spontaneous applause after a musical sequence, it left one
wondering how much of this appreciation was pandering and if the riotous laughter was
actually inspired by the old it’s-funny-because-they’re-men syndrome. Ultimately, this contradiction served to distract
from the narrative itself and begged the obvious question: if Baker really wants his play
to be taken seriously—i.e., on the same level as the first two pieces—why fall
back on the safety nets of the formerly “gay theater,” namely, homosexual
clichés and punchlines that work simply because of the gender of the actor delivering
them? Unfortunately, such inexcusably
still-marginalized material can’t have it both ways, as catcalls, dialogue-drowning
laughter from the audience, and even standing ovations do not necessarily equal respect. And though the audience clearly loved this final
piece—or at least fawned over it—there was the sense that Baker’s initial
lofty objectives went unfulfilled, or were else forgotten sometime around the fifth bow. |
