weebelly.com

Blind Man’s Bluff

Written by Steven Korbar and directed by Mindy Childress Herman

I was a bit disappointed by this one. The acting was solid as was the directing. But the script itself, for me, didn’t live up to its potential–that is, I thought it could have done a lot more than it did. Wayne Zahn (Derek Koger) is a blind man who likes to set up–what else?–blind dates with women over the Internet, and–of course–sends out pictures of male models that he passes off as photographs of himself–apparently thinking that because he’s blind no one else will be able to see the difference either. He meets up with sexy Felicia Rufus (Sarah Kunchik) who isn’t amused by the switcheroo that dear old Wayne has pulled on her. This is essentially the set up and the premise of the whole short piece. The two argue, present justifications, debate, etc. And toward the end actually have a meaningful heart-to-heart moment about his/her own weakness, ideal, disappointment, and defense mechanisms. But all the same, Felicia is still not happy and walks out, leaving Wayne to phone the next number on his list who also liked his online avatar. This play has some genuinely funny moments (Felicia, for instance, chides herself that she should have known Wayne was blind because his hotmail address is ‘eternaldarkness@’) and the thing with the guide dog is modestly cute (Wayne talks to the dog who is outside the restaurant and the dog barks appropriately); but there is much that is irritating as well–for instance, Wayne looks around all the time asking Felicia where she’s at (when she moves, of course) when I know damn well that any blind person with heightened senses would be able to tell where the person was; and, in general, the notion that a blind person cannot get a companion, has to pay prostitutes, and generate false personas cannot be in any way taken seriously; finally, there were too many easy jokes and too many cliches to really get behind this and feel it in any meaningful way. I think Korbar needs to take a look at this and cut out all the crap and figure out how these two people can connect–even if for a short drink–because even the connection they make isn’t enough.

Henry and Louise and Henri

Written by Kathleen Cahill and directed by Greg Vovos

Hands down the funniest of them all. Henry (Dennis Sullivan) and Louise (Lynna Metrisin) are American tourists sitting in an outdoor cafe in Paris. Henry is irritated because he’s hungry and all he’s been given is bread: no wine, no meat, no nothing. And the waiter (Ryan Smith) who keeps showing up doesn’t speak a lick of English–or if he does he isn’t letting on–and isn’t interested in taking the order of the two tourists. Irritated and tired (because they walked all day) Henry just wants to eat something and complain about how France isn’t like America. In America he’d have his food. In America he’d have the service that he wants. Louise isn’t listening. In a zone of her own since the outset, she stares off–visibly distant from her husband. When she does finally speak, at Henry’s insistence, she wants to talk about the little museum they went to earlier and how physically moved she was by the beauty she there beheld–Metrisin’s acting is intentionally Pollyanna and over-the-top in its gooey ‘wasn’t it just so beautiful’ sort of way. When he hears all this, Henry is sorry that he got Louise talking in the first place; and, true to his American nature, can only talk about how small the museum was and how he had to duck and how small the paintings there were, and if Henri Matisse weren’t a midget. Louise isn’t amused. She describes how much it means to her and how she had an orgasm while experiencing the beauty that took over her body. She is transformed. She can never go back to a life the way it was. Henry is happy for her, but he goes back to the small museum: for instance, the paintings were just unorganized and on the floor and scattered all around: anyone could just come in and take one and no one would even know–the sheer irresponsibility of it was astounding to him. This, of course, is when Louise takes a small painting from the waistband of her pants, revealing that she and her husband were thinking alike. Henry is overwhelmed by this. He can’t conceive her act. It’s not like not paying the toll on the Mass pike. It’s not like she can just roll through customs with it. What was she thinking. Louise, however, states that she is satisfied with her decision. In the heat of this discussion, the waiter appears and tries to take the bread. This sends Henry into an aggressive tizzy and he fights with the waiter, finally slapping him across the face. The waiter hails a cop (Tom Kondilas) who chases Henry away as Louise safely tucks the stolen painting back into her pants. She orders vin rouge and, drinking it with a naive pollyanna happiness, tells the world how much she loves France. This play is one of the best in the festival for its delicacy of character emotion and quick ability to flesh out deeply meaningful characters and connect with the audience. Additionally, it is well acted and well directed and genuinely enjoyable to watch. It was tender, it was heartfelt, it was funny.

Find Mucking

Written by Jayme McGhan and directed by Greg Vovos

At open, Kathleen (Margi Herwald) is masturbating on a desk–or is on the brink of orgasm anyway–while reading a car manual. We, the audience, of course, don’t know it’s a car manual at the outset, but the fact that it is, and we learn this later, demonstrates the way this play rolls. While Kathleen is thus involved, Maureen (Sarah Kunchik) enters through an upstage window startling the room to life. I am unsure of the relationship between the two, formally, but they are lovers. It is possibly a professor student situation. Regardless, the two women are lovers, but in the most unlikely of ways. Kathleen loves to have German philosophy and linguistics and forms of dry composition read to her–such as congressional hearings–as a means of ‘warming up.’ Maureen, on the other hand, loves the ‘hard’ sciences: chemistry and biology, talk of oceans and saltwater. As soon as they are into it, Kathleen stops: complaining that she can smell the reek of ‘doc martins and individual thought’ all over Maureen–is she cheating? There are the denials and arguments and in the end we find out that Maureen in fact is cheating: a young art/lit student named Desmond. He seduced her with Dali and Joyce; and eventually Maureen seduces Kathleen by the same methods–this ‘new’ method–art, emotion, love. This piece was definitely funny in a smart and creative way; and quotes like “you know you’re my one true brain,” and “spank my Nietzsche” are a true part of that.

Scream

Written and directed by Greg Vovos

So, what could be better than an end of the world cocktail party? How about one at which all the guests–one after the other– make his/her exit from the soiree over the side of the building they’re partying on? And what could be better than that? A media rep is on hand to film it all. It’s hard to tell if this is just a fun piece or if it is making a serious statement about the media in our society–as the final moment is that of the lone survivor from the party–the camera man–moving down to the side of the building: he looks over the edge, pretends to jump, laughingly changes his mind, and walks out the upstage door. The remaining image for us being the man’s black jacket back emblazoned with the word MEDIA. This short piece is a good time. It begins innocently enough with a man answering the door and a woman coming in with a bottle. Soon, a dozen people have come through the door and are swirling around atop the Gordon Square theatre’s balcony–which has now become the stage. Then, out of no where, one of the party goers voices his heard more loudly than all the rest: she is protesting something and says something to the effect, “Can you believe that they would do that to me?” After her statement silences the whole crowd of party-goers, she walks to the front of the stage/balcony and jumps. It is, of course, obvious that the actor is only falling three or four feet, but she drops and disappears and screams, decrescendoing her scream over time–attenuating it, as it were–until she slaps the floor–the thud being of course… So then, over the next dozen actors or so, the same scenario plays out. It is brilliant in its simplicity and in its hook: the party rages, a party-goer talks loudly about some insult–boom, over the edge he or she goes. It reminded me of 4 Murders by Brett Neveu where, of course, four murders occur–but it’s how they occur–and how the audience comes to expect them like clock-work–that makes the play interesting.

Scream was a great finale to what I would assert was a fun and successful 10-minute play festival, as 1) it involved all the actors from all the plays, 2) at the end they all pop-up from the balcony and take their bows. But more, the manner in which the audience had to travel around with chairs involved the audience; the short pieces were fun and active–for the most part–and engaged the audience and, like Raymond Bobgan, CPT’s Executive Artistic Director says,

“It’s a bit like a wine tasting. It’s about enjoying all the flavors, savoring the exploration, and defining your own tastes. Not every wine will appeal to everyone, but the next is just around the corner.”

Share this:

• Share

• Tweet
• Print
• Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

I went and saw Spawn of the Petrolsexuals: an underground comic again last night at Convergence Continuum‘s Liminis theatre. Seeing it a second time gave me the opportunity to step back and more thoughtfully consider the work given that the first time I watched it I was overcome by the often dense diatribes, the explosive multimedia components, and the shocking difference between its overall theatricality and style from that of most any other production I’ve ever seen.

To be a true reductionist about it, the play is about a group of homeless people who assume the identities of superheroes: Anger Boy, Holy Man, Free Girl, and another woman whose identity escapes me. Each character is defined by our modern environment: Anger Boy, subjected to a society dominated by machismo images and rampant sexuality, aggressiveness, etc.; Holy Man, defined by a life with people who were overly reliant on religious zeal (Christian) and the re-direction of sexuality into religious experience; Free Girl, who will not be bound physically or intellectually or socially; and the unnamed woman, who is defined by her once over-inculcation of domesticity in modern America and a continuous exposure to microwave ovens, etc. All speak the slogan, ‘Entropy reigns’ throughout. A constant reminder of the chaos and danger inherent in closed systems (intellectually) such as the United States seems to be (of which this play is a great criticism).

The play itself operates in a frame: that is, it begins and ends at the same place, so presumably the present action at the beginning and end contain all that is in-between (happening in the past); but the timeframe of this past is difficult to determine–a day, a week, etc. The play begins with Anger Boy and Holy Man naked, excepting a loin cloth, and brandishing crude weapons. They grunt and howl. The only distinctly elevated aspect of their behavior is Holy Man’s intercession on both their behalves for ‘grace.’ That is, howls Anger Boy, ‘all we ever wanted.’ The two then begin a hunt of sorts and the quarry soon appears, a man dressed in Middle Eastern garb; whom the other two catch, and beat, presumably to death. The parallel between the rage of America, the Christian influence on this rage, and the subjection of the Middle East is apparent. This first scene of action is then blacked out giving way to the first of several fascinating and well-developed multimedia pieces. The piece begins with a light-hearted example of 50’s/60’s propaganda (new convertible driving down the road with the whole family inside smiling and waving, a tractor and idyllic farm with a farmer waving, etc.) to a dominate and menacing industrial landscape (very like that in Cleveland at the turn of the last century): dominated by filthy smoke stacks gushing black soot and a hard dissonant metal guitar riff as an aerial shot zooms toward the precipice of our modern industrial chaos. During the whole, a homeless man passes under the screen (live in the theatre) and gathers up clothing that (we will find out later) belongs to the dead Free Girl. As the homeless man passes outs stage left, the lights come up and give way to the four super heroes. All stand down front on stage and lip-sync words that blare out through house speakers above as their virtual, heroic counterparts appear in Marvel Comic-style on-screen. ‘I am Anger Boy. The source of my superpowers comes from years of unrequited lust’ etc.

A big chunk of hard-to-digest exposition follows, once the superheroes are done talking, but it is immanently necessary to contextualize the audience. I’ll have to think hard about other ways of introducing this material, as I’m sure the playwright, Chris Johnston did. We’re given background that the group is trying to get to the distant Underdevelopments and out of the Center City, where they’re stuck. The main difficulty in getting out is a lack of fuel—and much comedy is drawn discussing possible sources: including shit and gas by-products of human consumption.

Various elements of the theatre space itself are employed to add a sense of involvement for the audience. Things fall from the sky (ceiling) the total space is used (pipes and bars that are behind the audience are held onto, swung upon), actors enter the seats, threaten the audience, solicit water from the audience, a garage door at the front of the theatre opens onto the street and is used as an entrance and exit as real traffic passes by, a trap door at the back of the stage is used for a very intense and highly interesting sequence when Anger Boy descends into the underground to visit Dark Angel–a sort of negative version of the hero visiting the wise person. It is a descent that the audience sees through the trap door, but as the door opens a camera shoots up from below and this image is on the main screen. It is as though one is seeing live theatre and participating in the creation of a 70s b-movie all at once and the effect is quite intense. Clearly, after Anger Boy descends, portions of the video were pre-recorded, for the screen is split and shows two angles–one from behind Dark Angel (of Anger Boy’s face) and one from behind Anger Boy (showing Dark Angel’s face). Down below, Anger Boy seeks the best method of gaining Free Girl’s unconditional love (he wants to possess her). Anger Boy is torn, Free Girl rejects his violence; but to Anger Boy, it is his super strength–what motivates him and the manner in which he protects Free Girl and how he leads the band of superheroes.

Other plot elements and characters are soon after introduced. A group of ruffians (whose names I forget but refer to we ‘normal’ citizens of the cities of America–we who have jobs, live in homes, etc.) comes in an attacks the superheroes, who aren’t so super after all. Anger Boy is beaten and made “bitch raped” (he performs humiliating acts of abasement while the three ruffians stand and laugh at him). And the Middle Eastern character who tells a highly poetic story of how green onions saved his life, cleaning rugs from his grandmother, and the terror of living in a world torn apart by violence: bombings, shootings, occupations, etc; and the arrogance of western powers (“we had electric lights thousands of years ago; we were the most glorious civilization in the world”) etc. I will call him the Arab for brevity’s sake and it sounds more superhero-ish anyway; the Arab is wooing Free Girl, too. Setting up a tension between the two strong male leads in the play. The act ends with this tension in full tilt between Anger Boy and the Arab, and the potential for the group of superheroes to make the journey out of the Center City and into the new land of the Underdevelopments.

The Second Act, of course, dissolves any silver lining that may have existed for the group. Messengers tell that the path out of the Center City has been cut; the heroes failed to find any viable fuel; and slowly the coherence and loyalty of the superhero band disintegrates.

Perhaps the best use of theatricality in the whole play occurs during the second act when the homeless man from earlier and Anger Boy bring in a broken tv set and put on a talk-show for the gathering of superheroes. The whole of the talk show format/discussion occurs on the main screen (filmed earlier) while the homeless man and Anger Boy mime what is happening on the screen through the broken tv set on stage–it is just the frame of the set with the glass/tube broken out. The homeless man pretends to be God and Anger Boy pretends to interview him. The conversation is irreverent and hilarious. God’s common phrase throughout the interview is “Oh, me.” (i.e ‘Oh, God’). I won’t attempt to cover the rambling philosophical and practical aspects of being God that God bemoans during this segment, but it is truly, beautifully comic. The plot thrust of this event is God convincing Free Girl to join (marry) Anger Boy. After it’s over, God is given a bottle of liquor for his trouble and the homeless man wanders off drinking.

To be continued…