COIL: The Rise and Fall of the Rising Fallen

Photo/Ryan Jensen

This "how the band met" tale from Banana Bag & Bodice is punk absurdism taken to a point at which it hardly seems satirical of the genre, a point at which it's as easy for me to believe that the Rising Fallen once toured the oil rig circuit (or at least an oil rig), finding themselves and their message amidst the cranks of their amps and the slosh of the oil, the hiss of the steam, the heat of the metal cage, and the constantly coerced blow jobs. The lyrics are nonsense ("And I tried to turn a monkey into a bee/and I lied when I wrote the wrong history"), but Peter Blomquist's giving one hell of a performance in his delivery of them, looking all the while like he's being electrocuted by the words, jerking around and collapsing to the floor after every song. It's an energetic mind-fuck, but their little living room performance space, where everything is everything, needs a little insulation to ground us.

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CULTUREMART 2008: Water & Miranda 5x

Note: Culturemart 2008 is a works-in-progress presentation by resident artists at HERE Arts Center. As such, they are not open to full reviews, so I've spoken generally about them, emphasized only the things that work, and tried to talk more about the artist's goal/vision than anything overly specific to a finished product.

- Water (or, the secret life of objects)

This should be the year of Sheila Callaghan. Not only will we see Crawl, Fade to White later this year with 13P (and two more in early '09), but Water is the opening salvo in a much longer piece that, if this is any indication, will be a series of international vignettes (in their native languages) with the common theme of water. Hence April Mattis plays a Katrina survivor, sitting, starving, on a roof, watching the press helicopters fly overhead (her thoughts literally bubble on screen behind her); Carolyn Bost and Gerardo Rodriguez play a couple from Oslo dealing with another 100-degree day; and in a series of prerecorded events, we see possible futures (in which Bloomberg is Chancellor of Saudi-America, faux fish are in, and fresh water goes for $400 a gallon) and hysterical pasts (like a retro 1985 educational video where a scientist promotes the "hard science" that disproves all the environmental alarmists). As directed by Daniella Topol, and with videos and lighting from William Cusick (the creative team from my #1 show of '05, Dead City), the play is already a heartbreaking maelstrom of interconnected thoughts, and it's already creative, most notably in the easygoing audience participation, which I wouldn't dare spoil. I'd happily get intoxicated on this Water, hyponatremia be damned.

- Miranda 5x

Welcome to "You Bet Their Life," a game show that lets the audience judge supposed criminals, like this week's unknown murderer. To help introduce us to the suspects, jovial host Dave (Joel Marsh Garland) and his clueless cohost, Julie Faluda (Kamala Sankaram) appear in prerecorded clips to introduce live "flashback" performances between Miranda (Sankaram) and the three men suspected of killing her. These pieces are blocked simply, with Miranda standing in front of a projection of various locales that are coupled with subtitles for her operatically cryptic conversations. She's assisted by her ensemble, Squeezebox, who provide a folksy classical spin on her arias. The most promising segment from this presentation is a fast-paced staccato song in a Starbucks that keeps Sankaram out of her falsetto, and which is coupled with some frantically edited close-ups of Miranda; as the scene continues, the melody becomes a loop for Miranda's inescapable future, and Sankaram removes herself from the role to add in a layer of gasping accordion notes, this time layered over surveillance footage from the coffee shop.

Frankenstein (Mortal Toys)

Photo/Sara Velas

Erik Ehn's Frankenstein (Mortal Toys) is the most faithful adaptation of Shelley's novel yet (remember Captain Walton?), despite the fact that it's pint-sized. It's described perfectly by the initiative that produced it -- HERE Arts Center's Dream Music Puppetry Program -- as Janie Geiser and Susan Simpson have brought about a play as visually beautiful yet elusive as a dream (and only occasionally as soporific), and Severin Behnen's mostly electric score is somnambulistastic. Chris Payne and Dana L. Wilson, the two real life actors who provide visible voice-overs from the "wings" are still enough that we can imagine them inhabiting those paper-thin shells, and they exist as just one more "double" of the characters on stage, much like those who theorize Frankenstein and the Monster to be parts of the same psyche. The overlap of scenic layers within the boxed-in stage gives for an illusion of depth, as do the play's poetic narrative and various devices: it gives the audience a sensation of freefall in which time slows, and like Alice down the rabbit hole, we can be lost amidst our thoughts.

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Amazons and Their Men

Photo/Carl Skutsch

Jordan Harrison's new play, Amazons and Their Men, is a clever work of fiction that investigates the escapism of film during a time in which the world was being plunged into darkness. Loosely following the real-life attempts of Leni Riefenstahl to film herself as and in Penthesilea, Harrison writes with a director's fluid grace, connects scenes with an editor's masterfully sudden sequencing, contrasts characters in the film with those in the play like a verbal cinematographer, and ultimately comes away with an elegant piece.

[Read on] [Also blogged by: Patrick]

The 39 Steps

photo: T. Charles Erickson

This screwball spoof of the old Hitchcock suspense film isn't essentially unlike the movie send-ups from The Carol Burnett Show but it has an extra high-concept kick: three of the cast of four have to manage over a hundred different roles and the movie's story has to get told with only a few multi-purposed props and set pieces. (My favorite moment: when our debonair hero is led deeper and deeper into the villain's mansion, it's accomplished on stage by having him walk through the same repositioned door over and over again). Sometimes an actor will play four or five different characters in the same scene: we're meant to delight in the breakneck speed of the quick-changes which, although obviously planned down to the most minute detail, often feel as spomtaneous as genuine improvisation. The show may be spoofing a film, but it's mostly designed to make us laugh at the simple age-old tricks of theatre. I did laugh, but not nearly as often as I'd hoped to: a good deal of the gags are more clever than funny, and at ninety minutes the show outlasted my interest by about half an hour.

Jump

Yes, yes, martial arts are impressive, I get it. But in the rapidly growing "niche" of spectacles in the theater industry, Jump is, at best, a mere hop in the right direction. You have to admire the rubbery cartoon energy of these live action anime heroes. But that's about it. This show has at least four different directors (comedy, choreography, consulting, &c.): I'm astonished they manage to get off the ground at all and all the more surprised at how often they recycle the same jokes, the same moves, and the same effects, none of which are particularly impressive the first time. Jump falls flat on its face. And unfortunately, because the floor is one giant rubber mat, it doesn't have the grace to stay down.

[Read on] [Also blogged by: David]