free sandwich with your angst

Justine told me that she and Jill had driven to Philly to see this show -- and I also knew that it had been touring all the European festivals these days. And also I don't know how, but I was on their e-mail list. So when I found $10 tickets to see the Nature Theater of Oklahoma's NO DICE, I had very vague expectations of greatness, which were, I am glad to report, vaguely met. I didn't know anything specific about the show, except for the fact that you get a free sandwich at 6.30, and that the show itself was 4 hours long (in actuality, this included the 30 minutes of pre-show sandwich time).

The show seemed to be constructed from texts from real-life conversations that were recreated and performed with great intensity, verve and surprising compassion by the main cast of three incredibly weird, very intense characters in bizarre costumes and sometimes various European accents. General themes of conversations ranged from the inanity of menial office work, the desperate lives of downtown actors, the terribleness of dinner theater, the brilliance of Johnny Depp, dieting & working out, drinking problems, different film versions of Hamlet, etc. The text (which may have been fed to the performers via earphones? not sure how the earpieces figured into the execution of the piece) was essentially banal, and the performances so thickly layered with repetitive gesture sequence and facial contortions, that made me question the sincerity of the conversations at face value -- but after the first hour, the overall effect was that of capturing the sense of hopefulness (and hopelessness) and optimism (and pessimism) of a generation of young artistic Billburg-types -- i.e. the majority of the audience and the performers. With a self-referential self-conscious acknowledgment of the superficiality and irony that pervades our daily existence, this play with dancing embodied the questions that haunt my circle of friends: how do you make an impactful, meaningful life with artistic integrity out of meaningless work for little money? Or something like that.

I liked a lot of it, and at some points I was laughing so hard I thought I might explode right there in my chair and leaky cup of bad red wine. I was sandwiched between Lanners who was also laughing and crying, and Judson who was for the most part nonplussed by the self-indulgence. I didn't need 4 hours of this, nor the last 20 minutes of the play which revealed that most of the text was taken from conversations between the director and his mom, but I enjoyed the performances tremendously. If I had to draw up a top 5 for 2007, No Dice would most likely be up there.