Why Why Always

In the city of a far away galaxy where the word “conscience” is not in the dictionary and a hotel room comes with a professional seductress, you are not allowed to ask “Why?”. You are there to see how the secret agent Lemmy Caution, posing as Ivan Johnson (Jim Fletcher), a journalist from Figaro-Pravda, falls in love while saving the life of Natasha von Broun (Saori Tsukada). The city is called Alphaville.

photo by Paula Court

This homage to the film Alphaville (1965) by Jean-Luc Godard recreates the atmosphere of the classic science fiction noir. The performance borrows entire scenes from the movie in recreating the scenography, wardrobe and the nuances of intonation. Sometimes the technical lingo of the script is being read along with the voice over narration: “Exterior, Night”. This adds on to the alienating effect, which is created by the replication of Godard’s dialogues alone.       

The multimedia design by Shaun Irons and Lauren Petty (creators of this performance) is what truly makes the piece. The artistic duo is live processing the video planted in the midst of the audience while at their control deck.

The action on stage is being captured by multiple video cameras and projected on the walls of the theater. Transparent dividers function not only as space markers, but also as screens, which allows for the intricate play with three elements: actor, projection and a shadow.

Video sequences include some prerecorded footage reconstructing shots from Alphaville (Lemmy in his car lighting up a cigarette, Lemmy and Natasha discovering that they love each other). In Godard’s film these shots were made intentionally foreign to the otherwise realistically looking scenes. Much like insertions of graphic symbols and stills, they look as if they belong to a completely different visual universe.

Shaun Irons and Lauren Petty borrow these alien elements and recreate the collage effect by juxtaposing the live action and the recorded performance, theater and film. The only catch is that the actors are performing exactly the same way on both stage and screen, very cold and distant from themselves.

Everybody becomes a part of the super-computer Alpha 60, which is simultaneously the theme, the object the set and the character in the play. Video, sound and light design in the hands of Irons and Petty become, not enhancements of the show, but the show itself, making an actor just another technical means. Member of the audience is being transformed into the viewing machine engrossed by the ASMR scene in which three actresses fold towels, the image of their hands doubled by three projections.   

As the actors sometimes walk behind the audience continuing their dialog, the entire space comes into play. The Underground Theater of the Abrons Art Center is probably the perfect location for Why Why Always with its ceiling resembling a sci-fi space ship. Sitting in the dark belly of it, prepare yourself for the meditative and engulfing journey to a city in the galaxy far away, and don’t ever ask “Why?”

Toast

Produced by Snapdragon Productions in association with Jagged Fence Theater, Toast is brought to New Yorkers as a part of Brits Off Broadway festival. One truly feels as though they are traveling in space and time as an all-male cast brings us to a bread factory in Hull, England in 1975.

 

photo by Oliver King

The only set of the play is meticulously build and painfully realistic. It features a break room of a factory where workers of the Sunday shift hang out, drink tea, play cards, smoke cigarettes, complain about life and play pranks on each other. They are all fed up with the work and everybody hates Sunday shifts the most. But everybody seems to have some kind of respite – a young wife waiting at home, joking around with old friends. Everybody seems to be hanging there despite the hard thankless toil, long hours and challenging life conditions; everybody except for Nellie (Matthew Kelly).

When Nellie shows up in the brake room, his face, his arms and his clothes are coated with flour, which seems like it’s at least several days old. Nellie seems like a person who got completely devoured by his work and became a man of few words, half man and half bread loaf. Peter, the only worker at the factory who wears his everyday clothes (which is the only obvious indicator of the time period) loses himself when left alone with Nellie while trying to have a small talk.  He gets angry at Nellie when the old man doesn’t talk much and seems uninterested in everything around him.    

When Peter leaves back to the bread plant and Nellie stays alone, we see him throwing bread from his sandwich towards the trash can buried in teabags while slowly eating a piece of cheese and staring into the void of the audience. The scene gets a laugh, the man is so tired of bread he can’t even eat it. But in fact he looks really sad as he slowly eats the lonely piece of cheese, not because he is enjoying it, but because he doesn’t have much to do. He would like to smoke but his wife gives him only one pack of cigarettes a week. He takes one out, glances at the clock and puts the cigarette back in disappointment.

During the first act I found myself looking at the clock above the door often too, I swear it goes slower than my watch. Sometimes you hear it ticking; sometimes the distant hum of working machines fills up the silence. Sound design by Max Pappenhime is as subtle as it is scrupulous.

The set design by James Turner has the same attributes. During the long scene in the beginning when Blakey (Steve Nicolson) walks the room, we have a chance to “walk” with him. Blakey unpacks his lunch, pours himself some water from the boiler and then takes aim at the overflowing trashcan with the teabag. You can see that some of the throwers weren’t very precise and a few bags landed on the floor, on the sink or stuck to the wall.  The set, very simple and dull on the first glance, is filled with the small details like this, which makes it look utterly realistic and oddly familiar.

The balance between personal and unifying is shown cleverly through these little traces of the human existence: identical jars for milk, some of them empty on the sink, some of them full or half full on the tables; flour prints of different hands on the furniture; identical teabags dried out in different spots.

These delicate details mirror and enhance the text of the play in which six factory workers are living their own lives, but because of the work at the bread plant, which takes so much out of them, they are at risk of becoming mechanical attachments to the stoves. As the flour dust is covering every surface in the break room, their lives are slowly getting covered with it too. Perhaps that’s why Peter was so angry at Nellie because he felt the threat of becoming like him. 

Talking and goofing around goes on until the student Lance (John Wark) joins the company. His awkwardness, naïve enthusiasm and bright clothes distinguish him from the others. And we see what the true reason for it is when he confesses to Nellie that he is the messenger who was sent to the factory to tell Nellie that he is destined to die that evening. The dimmed light of the scene suggests that Lance is not kidding.

I spend the intermission on the edge of my seat excited for a realistic play to take a metaphysical turn. The second act opens with the news that the stove is broken and someone needs to go inside in order to stop the baking, which will leave just enough time to make a new batch of bread before the morning comes.

The quickly unfolding events make you think that this is where the catastrophe will happen. But the good play that it certainly is, Toast is often unpredictable. The playwright Richard Bean switches genre gears in a heartbeat mainly through the character of Lance.

A brilliant cast directed by Eleanor Rhode delivers some warm and gentle comedy, which is not always easy to follow because of the mumbling of thick British accents. The comedy is not the genre tag I would attach to the play though. A comedic element here is more like a necessary measure of survival in harsh work conditions of the factory then it is a tool of entertaining the audience. I wouldn’t call Toast a workplace drama too even though the factory problems are discussed all the time and it is the malfunction of the equipment that pushes the events forward.

You can look at Toast as a tapestry of charismatic bread factory workers dealing with the crisis and enjoy it this way. But to me the most interesting experience was being caught when I wanted plot “candy”, that metaphysical twist, and didn’t quite get it. Instead of that I got more “bread”, the everyday peoples’ collisions. The bread is more nutritious than candy though. When it’s made just right it’s the greatest food you can have.           

The Hundred We Are

The North American Premiere of The Hundred We Are by Swedish playwright Jonas Hassen Khemiri took place at the Cell and was directed by Erwin Maas. The space provided an intimate atmosphere by bringing the actors closer to the audience and placing them at our eye-level, which made the experience very personal.

photo by Sara Krulwich

Three actresses in the play represent different stages in the life of a woman whose journey we are witnessing from birth until death. There is the rebellious teenage side of her (Mirirai Sithole), an unbalanced middle age incarnation (Orlagh Cassidy) and an old woman (Kitty Chen). All three coexist and interact, referring to themselves as “we”. The third actress plays other people but doesn’t speak until the end of the play. All the talking for her is done by the Shadow (Caitlyn Cisco).

The camera sits in a corner while live streaming a wide angle shot of the audience that is projected on the wall above the “stage”. Occasionally one of the actresses grabs the camera and walks with it to the upper level of the space, talking to it. The usage of the video seemed unnecessary to me, the costumes by Jenny Green looked like they were bought last moment on sale at Forever 21. But all of it is quickly forgotten and falls down like an onion peel, allowing us to bite into the juicy and flavorful body of the text.

The text of The Hundred We Are, brilliantly translated by Frank Perry is layered, and it interweaves memories with fantasies, dialogs with other people with inner dialogs. It’s filled with poetry. It makes you laugh and cry. One can truly imagine being inside the head of a confused woman. One side of her wants to follow the idealistic dreams of her youth, to help the unprivileged and to write political poetry. The other side is seeking stability in marriage and the career of dental hygienist.

The ethnically diverse cast suggests the universality of the story. The play succeeds in being abstract enough to fit virtually any person experience but doesn’t make you lose interest by pinning some of the experiences with poetic details.

There is also a moment of interfering with reality in the show of which I only read afterwards in the New York Times review. In the director’s note, Ervin Maas says: “Little did we know that some of the themes of the piece would play out in our creative and development process. (…) Only days before opening we arrived at a point of no return: how do we move forward and deal with these frustrating, yet honest obstacles of not remembering?”

While reading the program before the show, I didn’t realize that these words refer to the fact that Kitty Chen, who played Actress 3, had trouble remembering her lines. That’s why the character of Shadow was added to the cast. That’s why there was a projection of the text on the wall behind the audience as a teleprompter. That didn’t bother me at all as my eyes were on stage and I quickly forgot about it.

There was a moment when Mirirai Sithole stumbled in her lines but instead of moving forward as if nothing happened as it usually done in the theater, she started to walk, drawing more attention to what is happening and unraveling the knot of lines: “She said that and that and now…” arriving to the place in the text where it snapped.

That threw me off for a second but suited the mood of the play. Some memories run smoothly as a filmstrip and you have no problem replaying them in your head again and again, much like your favorite stories to tell, much like theater show. But theater also has a sporadic element in it, which shows that it’s a process of constant work and making decisions. As Ervin Mass writes in his Director’s Note regarding the problems they faced in rehearsals, there are two choices: “1. To hide the struggles most of us have (…) or 2. To run towards these embarrassments and instead openly explore and address them”.     

The Dingdong

The Dingdong is set in Paris in 1938, which we only find out at the end of the show when one of the characters exclaims: “This is Paris in 1938, only good things are heading our way!” This is probably the funniest joke in the play although it is supposed to be a “door slamming sex farce”. This is how the playwright Mark Shanaham refers to the work of George Feydeau, whose play, Le Dindon written in 1896, he adopted.

Besides changing the time period, Shanaham got rid of some and added other characters and made the cast of five actors play 13 roles. Director Hal Brooks did a great job at orchestrating the appearances and exits timing with wardrobe changes. Here the “door slamming” element comes into play. The transforming set designed by Sandra Goldmark provided multiple doors for that, but the entire construction was shaking furiously every time the French doors of the apartment in the first act were slammed.

Although the ingenuity of the construction is worth the applause and minimalistic and highly stylized design is a very noble intention, but over all the work of Sandra Goldmark had a hurried vibe. Costumes by Amy Clark, on the other hand, were very elaborate and detailed. The combination of predominantly purple and lilac dresses on women in combination with the bright canary floor was a little too painful for the eyes but it created a kitschy visual style appropriate for the play.

The Dingdong follows the bedroom adventures of Lucy and Vatelin, as well as three other married couples and a few of their friends and accidental acquaintances. This play is the embodiment of the stereotype that Paris is the most romantic city on earth where everybody looks to get laid.  

The irony is that all the exaggerated flirting and seducing leads, not to passionate sex, but to a lot of comedic gags involving mixing up partners, running around and hiding as well as some fart jokes. The attempt of catching her husband in the act of infidelity and paying an eye for an eye ends with everybody involved hugging in a burst of love and forgiveness in the middle of the hotel room wearing their underwear.