WORKSHOP: Crime or Emergency

This performance of Crime or Emergency was part of the SoHo Rep Studio, and as such is still a work-in-progress. That's good; I don't think I'd ever feel comfortable reviewing it: Sibyl Kempson's half-cabaret half-theater schism of a play is not the sort of thing I'd normally go to, and it's a valuable lesson learned on my part. I don't like entrenched, cult theater: I want everything for everybody. Still, I certainly support Kempson's risks, and I'm glad she's got an audience that appreciates her.

Amazons And Their Men

photo: Carl Skutsch

Rebecca Wisocky plays "The Frau" (code for Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl) with eyebrows up and cheeks sucked in: she's a couple of hand flourishes away from turning into Norma Desmond descending the staircase. No one else on stage seems to live in the same silent screen pantomime world that The Frau does, which is fine considering that she's the only one gripped by an artistic vision. As Jordan Harrison's seriocomic play imagines the director, on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland, she's tired of filming rallies and hyperfocused on making a "pure art" feature film in which she plays Penthesilea. She has to employ Jews and gypsies and other "undesirables" on the Nazis' dime to realize her vision: the playwright intriguingly links her ruthless artistic perfectionism and her blind passion with Fascism. But the most compelling contradiction about Riefenstahl - that her work honoring the heinous Nazi party which subsidized her did in fact yield stunningly beautiful works of visual art - seems beside the point of this play, which is more interested in her as a metaphor than as a believable complex character and visionary artist. She's simplified into dictator and destroyer to serve the playwright's aims.

COIL: Particularly in the Heartland

Particularly in the Heartland is a fantastic journey into the meaning of America, a tale that unites not only a left-wing New York businesswoman (Jessica Almasy) with a trio of Rapture-fearing Christian children (Kristen Sieh, Frank Boyd, and Libby King), but with their American past, a resurrected Robert Kennedy (Jake Margolin), and their probable future, a pregnant alien (more like the immigrant kind) named Tracy Jo (Jill Frutkin). The collaboration of a hard-boiled theater group shows: their subtle nuances all succeed, and director Rachel Chavkin gets away with some of the most fluid and heartbreaking montages. If anything, it's the more experimental stuff that gets in the way -- the audience adds nothing to the performance -- and the play, though I suspect left intentionally lumpy in places, could benefit from being about fifteen minutes shorter.

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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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