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Went to the Opera Cleveland production of La Voix Humaine and Pagliacci last Thursday night. 

Pagliacci collage from Opera Cleveland

The first piece was very difficult to sit through.  I read about later and learned that it was an avant garde piece and is considered a wonderful analysis of one human being’s isolation, etc, and highly prized as it is one of the only solo opera pieces for women.  I told my wife that it was as near a conception of hell as I have ever had. If I wrote a play like La Voix Humaine, not only would it not be staged, but people who read it would most likely slap me in the head.  La Voix Humanie (music by Francis Poulenc to a libretto by Jean Cocteau) has a rather novel concept: a woman (Elle — Robin Follman) whose lover is dumping her has just suicided herself with a bunch of pills and is on the phone with him.  The phone is a party line and the call is continually interrupted and disconnected. You might be able to sustain this for :10 to :15 minutes. The opera piece was one hour.  One hour of a one-sided conversation. One hour of the most mundane and tiresome conversational points.  Cocteau should have been slapped in the head.  I don’t care that they label this thing as a Dadaist experiment or whatever; it was unpleasant.  And, to some extent, I think Cocteau might have known that and was forcing Madame Berthe Bovy, for whom it is said he wrote it, to endure the piece. Regardless, even if its intent was to exhaust everyone involved in the piece it surpassed that moving into a new realm of violence against an audience. There are several shifts in the piece, for instance, first she is very off-hand with her lover, sort of like: ‘well, while you were out of town I went out with my friends and partied, etc.’; this shifts later when she admits that she lied and was at home the whole time by the phone waiting for his phone call (which never came).  Later she admits how desperate she is for him and then hears jazz music in the background, thus realizing he’s out on the town and is most likely disinterested in her (as was I at that point).  I feel somewhat cruel and unfeeling, as I have been in her position before (long ago) with regard to love, but strangely did not have much sympathy for her; in fact, I found the whole thing quite annoying.  A larger problem, perhaps, with the experience for me was the fact that 1) the lines were sung (duh! Opera) and 2) they were in French, which of course meant I spent my time reading it.

After La Voix Humaine, Pagliacci was a godsend.  Hear Caruso sing Vesti La Giubba Thank God for multiple characters, a plot, and some action! I never felt so relieved.  The irony is not lost on me, given my recent predilection for plotless plays. I can see where the modern musical has its origin. Having looked at Brecht a bit I saw many interesting things going on. For instance, at the outset there is a dumbshow and tragedy (in black) confronts comedy (in white).  Also, the character of Tonio (Michael Chioldi) comes out and directly addresses the audience reminding them that the clowns are real people and feel just like the audience does. So, in this short prologue you have the premise of the piece outlined and are instructed that these are actors playing parts. The premise of the piece is that Canio (Gregory Carroll) is the head of a troupe of clowns who go from town to town entertaining in villages.  It is a commedia dell’arte troupe complete with Harlequin, etc. Canio’s wife, Nedda (Robin Follman), is cheating on him with a man (Silvio — Eric Dubin) in the village that they come to entertain. The payoff for this plot is fulfilled by using the play within the play: the subject matter of the play within the play is identical to the main problem of the play itself: i.e. the cuckolding of Pagliacci and the cuckolding of Canio (the character who plays Pagliacci–which means ‘clown’).  So, these two events mirror each other, but the most excellent part is when Pagliacci is confronting his wife Colombina about her cuckolding him and you suddenly realize that it’s not the clowns at play anymore, but Canio has broken his character and is really confronting Nedda.  This is compounded by the audience being present to watch the commedia dell’arte farce and their reaction to Canio’s performance–which, of course, is no performance. Silvio is equally confused as he doesn’t know, due to the subject matter of the play within the play, whether to intervene and stop Canio/Pagliacci from killing Nedda/Colombina.  Very like Hamlet, Canio gets the reaction that he wants. That is, as Canio begins to kill Nedda, Silvio is flushed out of hiding and forced to confront Canio.  But it is too late, as Canio has knifed Nedda and follows up by knifing Silvio. Canio then announces, ‘the play is finished’. The whole nature of the play within the play mirroring the ‘reality’ in the play’s world was highly engaging to me as an audience member, but then the method by which the two were made to work against one another was fantastic. It formed a dialog between the two whose irony was only apparent to the real audience in the theater, not the ‘fake’ audience on the stage. The contrasts though were forced to be drawn: the two scenarios, the clowns with the ‘real’ character counterparts, and of course, the two audiences sitting face to face: one unaware and ‘entertained’ the other fully aware and thrilled and horrified all at once. The operatic moments also work very much like Brechtian songs, making the audience aware that this is no “reality” and that you are seeing a performance. The dialog that is created between the notion of what is a performance and what is real is also created, as there are many characters whose action mirror those of the characters in the play-within-the-play. This coupled with the admonition by Tonio at the outset that clowns feel too forces a consideration about the nature of performance and what is real and what is ‘staged’.

Given the known troubles that Opera Cleveland is having, one thing that surprised me was the set and effects, the large number of people (chorus), etc.  I just wondered if it wouldn’t be possible to have productions that were stripped down completely and used some other methods for effects.  With this play there are probably 4-5 characters really needed, not the dozens that were present.  Obviously, the orchestra is necessary and I’m sure that is a significant expense.  It is just interesting to ponder the costs and differences between running a theater company and an opera company and the factors that enter into the various models.

One thing that disappointed me, of course, is that I’m very used to being in theaters like convergence-continuum where you are, happily, only feet from any actor at any given moment.  For $30 I was way the hell back from the stage and under a balcony to boot.  The proscenium was pronounced and the fourth wall was present–though occasionally broken, by Tonio’s direct address, for example.

I very much enjoyed the experience, being a fan of some musicals (I know, I know…) it is no surprise (i.e. Les Miserables, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Producers). The music was well-played (as far as I know) and conducted (Dean Williamson); the performances well directed (Bernard Uzan) and I thought the voices were very fine.  I will definitely make a point of going back again, if Opera Cleveland is around…

Mayannah, Rosemary, and Ani prepare to dine.

Went and saw Brainpeople at convergence last Thursday night.  I must admit that I don’t know how to feel about it.  I take that back, I do know how I feel about it; I just…as I so often do…question whether my impression is correct.  I suppose it’s silly, really.  After all, one’s impression is one’s own and needn’t seek any external validation; however, one can be off-base in the variables one puts in one’s calculations, and that is what I fear.  Regardless, this is just an avoidably long way around saying that I thought it was a not very good play. In fact, a bad play.

While no expert, I am familiar with Jose Rivera: References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot, Marisol, and I listened and laughed as he described the insults and stupidities endured as a Hollywood screenwriter in Tales from the Script. So I am still a bit shocked.

First, let me disclaim a few things.  The convergence production was very good:  I’m assuming (having not seen it anywhere else).  That is, the set was sumptuous.  The atmosphere was wonderful (lighting, sound).  It was storming when I went to see it and you could hear the rain pounding on the roof which added to the eerie effect of the thing; and the effect of the dystopian environment and fear of a police state was effective.  I thought the acting was terrific, especially that of Kristi Little, which frankly blew me away and was worth the whole trip.  Her portrayal of Rosemary, and her deft powerful shifts through multiple personalities was both terrifying and exhilarating.

The problem I have is with the play itself.  And it could be that I’m in this phase where I’m obsessing with Eric Overmyer and Len Jenkin and the Wooster Group and Megan Terry and reading Brecht and Artaud and Ionesco, in short, dealing with playwrights who are challenging form and structure and authorial position.  But, I was just shocked that here is a very, very good playwright who has three women on the stage and the majority of the play is monologs.  That was just flabbergasting.  And one significant piece of the play has a major character (Rosemary) catatonic on a chair periodically chirping pieces of a rather predictable sentence.  I just could not believe that I was watching a Jose Rivera play (whose past character lists include a coyote , a cat, madmen, guardian angels).  I couldn’t believe that Rivera would handle three characters like playwriting students in a 101 class.  And to make the characters more effective within this stultifying mold, he just gave them quirks which seemed more contrived to me than anything fundamentally real at their core.  I felt, more than once, that the choices Rivera made were intentional and contrived (not developing naturally out of the writing) and pushed in place to serve the plot’s outcome, not, again, any sort of organic meaning from the writing or meaning that rises up out of the unconscious.

The plot is that one woman (Mayannah, played by Laurel Johnson) lures two other women (Rosemary and Ani, played by Laura Starnik) to her house with the offer of $20,000 if they can make it through dinner.  This is one of the plots.  The other plot uses the literal presumption that you are what you eat to suggest that you literally can experience the memories, feelings, etc., of whatever creature it is that you have consumed; this theory is key to Mayannah whose parents were eaten by a Tiger when she was 8 years old.  By eating Tiger every year at this strange dinner, Mayannah hopes to be able to find her parents via one of her guests.  In this case, Rosemary, whose multiple personalities make her susceptible, apparently, to channeling Mayannah’s consumed parents.  Interesting as all this is, I could only see a re-hashing of Hollywood plots.  Since every pitch for a screenplay is supposed to be a combination of two movies in some way, Brainpeople is House on Haunted Hill meets Altered States.

One of my professors, David Todd, has mentioned in passing, and I’m paraphrasing, that once you become a playwright and sit through enough plays there comes a point when you can pretty much see how a play is going to play out right off the bat.  And there are two outcomes for this: one is that you become very cynical about what you’re seeing and the second is that you begin to develop a taste for stuff that really challenges you in new ways–or stuff that is surprising or occasionally you get surprised by more traditional fare that is really, really good.  Unfortunately, with this play, I found myself in the cynical position.  It was very hard for me to be there after a certain point.  Once I realized how this play was working I was just dispirited. Dispirited, I think, by the fact that meaning was going to be handed to me in this utterly conventional way.  There was a clock on a table on the set facing the audience and I found myself staring at the hands while time passed in five minute increments.  The only place that really blew me away was when Rosemary told her story and there I was overcome by Little’s acting which was just flat out great.  I’m certain, too, that some credit is due Clyde Simon’s direction in keeping Little’s transformations on edge like that.  Starnik had her moments as well, describing her love affair with Mayannah’s father through the television, which demonstrated glimpses of Rivera’s sense of humor and the bizarre, which were unfortunately missing from most of the play. Johnson got a moment, too, describing her first communion gone awry.  Regardless, other than those few points, the seams and mechanics of Brainpeople, the formal strategies and plot points, were just way too visible and the rotation of monologs among the women, some of which nearly turned the characters into cartoons, were just disappointing.