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Went and saw Insomnia at CPT last week (or maybe two weeks) with Jordan Davis. Had a real good time and enjoyed the show at CPT thoroughly.

 

Insomnia proves again why the combination of Raymond Bobgan and Chris Seibert is powerful. POWERFUL. Tack on Holly Holsinger who can thoroughly dominate (as both an actor and director) and you’ve got some seriously muscular theater, which Insomnia is. Both Bobgan and Seibert demonstrate again (also Holsinger) why the organic process that they use to create inspired productions works and works well. Their exploration of personal story, myth, and religion works on the level of the unconscious leaving one with the peculiar sensation of having slept well and dreamed. And their exploration and use of space, acting techniques, sound, lighting, as well as in the more physical aspects of comic theater give the mind’s eye a feast of stage images to connect with the psionic elements.

The play opens in the attic of a house, which is of course suggestive of the psychological landscape in which the play’s action will take place. At first I wondered if the piece weren’t somewhat like Albee’s Three Tall Women, with each woman representing a different phase of life for the “main” character. I initially thought that this “main” character, in terms of focus, was Holsinger’s character (Ev) but it became quickly clear that Seibert’s character (Zelda) represented an imaginary friend or invisible playmate; and that the “main” character might be Evelyn (Anne McEvoy), who comes up the stairs from the “real” world below.

Seibert as Zelda plays a magnificently manic playmate who reminded me all-too-well of my daughter: with endless pulses of energy and a ruthless and relentless desire to play something regardless of my own lack of interest. Zelda made manifest that constant pushing and prodding that children do so well, as well as a deceptively naïve sweetness that became sharply brutal and precise in a flashing turn. Holsinger lives up to her name by singing frequently throughout the piece, showing off a lovely, deep voice and from the program it appears that the songs are original.

The physical aspects of the production (presentational) are tremendous. At the outset there is only Holsinger on stage, but soon there is thumping inside a trunk which was perhaps overlooked by the audience (was by me) from which Seibert emerges, playfully. She uses a croquet mallet as a periscope and then dances across the stage. Holsinger and Seibert play dress-up and enact the rapid-fire characters and dialogue of a circa 1930s/40s movie, like It Happened One Night or His Girl Friday. In an inspired dream sequence Seibert becomes an elemental force from another plane, cloaked in a diaphanous flowing garment—a resplendent ghost.

Equally strong is the sense/meaning of loss and reckoning in the play; the terrible sense of having settled and having not fulfilled a potential. The sense that life has become mundane and polite; a place that is all too easy for each of us to fall into and to which to become accustomed. If we are not careful and watchful we are at risk of taking much for granted: our life path, the people around us, and perhaps worst of all, our own selves. Insomnia addresses this head long and with an unflinching gaze; so much so that one might lose sleep at the horrifying confrontation.

Not to close on a down note, but I want to get off my chest the fact that I did not like the ending of the piece. There are several reasons for this, but the two biggest include that it 1) broke the frame of the play (with Holsinger going around and out to talk with the audience) and 2) it attempted to but a bow on a play that was best left unwrapped. I understand the impulse. In talking with Jordan Davis afterward we discussed that one great difficulty in this type of piece is that it is very difficult to close off. In my own work I often confront this problem and flinch in the face of providing a neat ending—it is too much for me to bear. I believe Insomnia could end when Holsinger’s Ev is revealed as being the “main” character and walks confidently out of the attic closing the door to descend to the remains of her (old?) life below. The powerful sense that there will be change is comparable to that of Nora slamming the door at the end of Ibsen’s play. I don’t know if there was too much of a sense that perhaps people would miss the resolution of that, or if that was not concrete enough resolution, or if there needed to be some clarification. I didn’t think so, and to me it undermined the power of what came before.

Cut to Pieces, another fabulous piece about which I cannot say enough is coming back soon to CPT and I can’t wait to see it.

After Insomnia, Jordan and I went to Happy Dog and heard The New Soft Shoe, which does covers of Gram Parsons. It was a pretty cool show and we sat with some friends of Jordan’s, one of whom, strangely enough, was a graduating Case student who was in Gilbert Doho’s theater class when I went to speak to them about my play Patterns. Small world.

Just went to see The Heidi Chronicles at the Eldred Theater at Case.  I enjoyed the show, though it continued a recent pattern for me of finding myself strangely at odds with shows that are “realistic” in nature.

This was the first time I’d been to the Eldred despite my desire to go to many of the performances that the Department of Theater and Dance puts up—some of them very good shows (How I Learned to Drive, Rhinoceros, etc).  It was a pleasant little theater with a proscenium stage.  The set was very plainly done with the whole cast formally and stiffly moving things about.  The plain backdrop hid the ability to light from behind various actors and actresses in silhouetted poses and period dress.

After the first scene or two I found myself saying (to myself) I’m going to hate this play.  But by the time Heidi’s meltdown speech at her former girl’s school I found myself very much enjoying it as I think Wasserstein does an excellent job handling the nuanced pain of her character and the sacrifices that she has made to earn her success.

The play is episodic as it skips through time highlighting trends in American culture as they impact or relate to women, with Heidi as the litmus test or case study of the intelligent, successful woman dealing with a still male-directed and dominated society. The production did a good job using costume (Cleveland Play House — which reminds me of the moving job that they’ve got coming for them) and crashing sound score montages of music and the speeches of key political and cultural figures.  Wasserstein deftly handles her characters, though, so the episodes don’t feel episodic and the pacing and flow of the play works—I contrast this with, say, Freakshow, which I saw at convergence, which despite very competent direction, still seemed choppy and seems that way even in the reading.  Kathryn Metzger did an outstanding job as Heidi.  Metzger had poise and her facial expressions alone carried a complexity of emotion that was impressive.  She was supported very well by both Andrew Lund (Peter) and Logan Stetzer (Scoop).

Despite the episodic nature: the mix of time, the mashed-up sound score, and some interesting scene changes and set dynamics, the play seemed too much in the realm of realism for my taste.  Having just read both Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and Fences, I’m about full-up with realism in the theater.  I’m also working on two pieces now (and thinking about a third) that have the potential for realistic tendencies, which I’m trying like hell to avoid.  LBL opened up for me a new way of writing and thinking spatially and I don’t want to lose that to habits.  But moreso, I don’t want to lose that thing that is most vital to theater—its three dimensional, special, transgressive ability—and by that I mean the penetration of the fourth wall and the involvement of audience, not the passive recliner based approach to theater.

Ionesco writes,

“Why could I not accept theatrical reality? Why did its truth appear false to me? And why did the false seem to want to parade as true, substitute for truth?…[The actor’s] material presence destroyed the fiction. It was as though there were present two levels of reality, the concrete reality, impoverished, empty, limited, of these banal living men, moving and speaking upon the stage, and the reality of the imagination. And these two realities faced each other, unmasked, irreconcilable: two antagonistic universes which could not succeed in unifying and blending.” (Ionesco and Pronko 4)

I think I have finally come to understand what so upset Ionesco and am coming to understand what makes metatheatricality so important and a hyperreal or absurd or fantastic approach to theater equally important: the alternative is “impoverished, empty, and limited.”  There is something about the “two realities” facing each other that just shows the staged reality to be a thin grey thing…or, as Sylvia Plath might say, "They are always with us, the thin people / Meager of dimension as the gray people / on a movie screen. They / are unreal, we say."  As I read August Wilson it became almost unbearable, imaging these scenes playing out on stage; the unbearable unreal reality of it, like a scab that you mustn’t pick, and yet your fingers keep on sidling over to it.

Regardless, despite my conflicted feelings about realistic plays right now, I found Heidi to be enjoyable and the Case actors did a wonderful job.