Darjeeling Limited

All the urban hipsters love Wes Anderson, and I loved him too -- Rushmore was a really great film. But after awhile, the same gimmicks wear a bit thin. The slo-mo sequences with emotive music, the flat line-deliveries resulting somehow in moments that are meant to be poignant. Darjeeling Limited was yes, cutesy as I expected it might be. Two troubled brothers are summoned by their third (and eldest) to join him on a mysterious trip through India for the purposes of brotherly-bonding, soul-seeking, and, most importantly to find their estranged mother who has long ago become a missionary-nun in the foothills of the Himalayas. The first two-thirds of the film this journey proves to be a bumbling disaster with such antics as the train getting lost, and the brother getting kicked off the train. While seeking an alternate mode of transport, they come upon thee young Indian boys (presumably brothers) who are trying to cross the river with a load of supplies, but their raft is overturned. Our three protagonists jump into the river to try to save the young boys, but their efforts are not wholly successful in the wild torrents of the river: Adrian Brody emerges from the river with a dead Indian boy in his arms. From there, the three somehow (finally) connect with each other, and also reconnect with the memory of their father's death. The funeral rituals, because of their foreign-ness, are profound and beautiful to the three. They emerge having come together, having learned something intangible about brotherhood and humanity, even if on a small scale.

Honestly, it is a cute movie and everything, but the more I think about it, the more I feel like it's such a WHITE movie, as in the kind of film only a white person could make. The whole exploration of what the filmmaker and the protagonists find exotic/foreign/fascinating is not without the acknowledgment of objectification -- but for their spiritual epiphany to be triggered at the expense of the life of a young Indian boy, to me was rather cheap and exemplary of the whiteness of the movie. And I'm not even a hardcore PC racism-patroller or anything.

Punk Kabuki

An unlikely marriage, I know, but Brendan Connelly (composer) and Brooke O'Harra (director) make Drum of the Waves of Horikawa a wild ride throughout. The 18th century kabuki play by Chikamatsu in Donald Keene's translation is electrifyingly alive in the mouths and bodies of this crack team of performers who fully embrace the thrash-mosh energy of Brendan's moody punk-ish compositions. I was particularly impressed by Heidi Schreck -- who I'd seen in several other shows -- and thought this was the best work she's done, and that she really carried the show from each gyration to the next cross-eyed grimace. I'm not sure it needed to be 2 hours long (five episodes) and towards the end, especially after Schreck's character is beheaded, the drive to the end lags a bit. Also noteworthy were all the design elements by regulars of Theater of a Two-Headed Calf, Emily Rebholz' costumes, Justin Townsend's lights, and Peter Ksander's set -- I think half the plays I see have sets by Peter, his designs are always exciting, creative and very specific. Check out the toilet-plungers.

Boyfriend in a coma I know, I know

I'd heard of playwright Jason Grote quite a bit so when I got a notice about his latest play 1001 at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, I decided to go without even really researching what the play was about. Grote has a very ambitious play on his hands, many things that are challenging and work to varying degrees of success. From the lobby entrance to the theater, audience members are given a colored coupon and told to follow along a colored line (corresponding to the color of their coupon) taped to the floor. The lines diverge and snake along the perimeters of the theater and end up in different point of the playing space. A cute device that demonstrates very literally that divergent paths can still lead to the same center. The play itself, staged in the round (or square, as it were) follows a similar structure: several storylines (some more leading than others) intertwined, with the two protagonists finding each other in a love relationship that spans different eras, mythologies, times and spaces. They are Scheherazade and the Persian king (the framing story of Arabian Nights), they are also a contemporary young couple in New York (one an Arab and the other a Jew) who end up suspended in limbo when the next war/terrorism strikes NY and the guy gets bricked in the head and ends up in a coma. The other handful of cast members play a multitude of characters from rivaling romantic interests to Scheherazade's sister, even Gustave Flaubert and Jorge Luis Borges make appearances -- and though this smorgasbord of characters and settings seem intended to create a complex vortex of many disparate stories converging into one, there is something forced in the script and direction that makes it very apparent what the play is up to -- its edge is never quite sharp enough to really surprise or enchant. The cast is limber and versatile, and there are some very effective moments in the play. The live dj running the sound and projected text (for scene titles and once an on-line chat-love-scene) gave the production an air of hipness that didn't quite mesh -- it may have had something to do with the lead actor Matthew Rauch, who I've seen in a bunch of show -- or maybe it was just Red Bull's The Revenger’s Tragedy which for some reason I found so banal -- who is like "a very good actor" type and drives me crazy. The play actually reminded me of that movie The Fountain, in that they both were attempting to weave a timeless (or rather trans-temporal) epic love story but didn't quite keep it together. The Fountain was more beautiful, 1001 was more convincing, but both were kinda cheesy.

FOOD COMA!!!!!

Ivo Van Hove, why do you hate playwrights so much? Why do you hate Americans so much? And why do you hate actors? The Belgian director is at NYTW once again, making aping idiots of us all, with the unlikely The Misanthrope -- yes Moliere's. Much fuss has been made about Van Hove, who undoubtedly has a unique vision and great aesthetics. The designs of his shows are what are most notable -- always a stark, bold, clean canvas upon which he smears the filth of humanity. In this case, food. The original play is about Alceste, an all-or-nothing kind of guy, morally speaking. He can't accept anything less than the honest-to-God brutal truth, and abhors the convention of manners and politeness -- and yet he is in love with the most superficial socialite around. About 20 minutes into the piece, Alceste rudely interrupts his acquaintances' lunch spread from the deli by laying his body on top of the picnic. He then proceeds to drench himself in chocolate syrup, catsup, jam and anything else he can get his hands on, in a gesture meant to demonstrate in graphic terms the true disgusting animal face of mankind. It certainly effective in invoking revulsion, especially with the stench of all that food permeating the theater (later, with the flinging of sour cream and tomato sauce pretty much covers all the bases in terms of olfactory overload). Unfortunately this big mess does little to elucidate the play. Grossly miscast and with no attempt to actualize the characters the way Moliere wrote them, Van Hove's intention weighs heavily atop the actors like an old stinky rag and the dramatic structure splinters with each passing moment, despite the intricate and innovative video work and heated performances.

This Krummy Life

I wish I knew what kind of name "Krum" is in Polish. Does it feel like "Jim" or more like "Anderson"? I can only guess it feels just as it sounds, Krum -- crumb, crumble. The Polish company TR Warszawa was at BAM with New York premiere of Krum by the late Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin. When I walked into the Harvey, the set, to me, felt like a David Lynch space. Latticed wood floor, walled in perimeters with windows, heavy curtains, lush green/red/blue thick velvet fold-out train beds, a few banks of heavily cushioned theater seats and a projection screen hung in the center of the space. Combined with the incessant (I mean truly, relentless and endless) score of trancey lounge music underscoring the play, it felt, initially, as if a dancing dwarf was going to crawl out of a hole in the ground, or a voluptuous naked lady was going to writhe about in pain in the corner.

What ended up transpiring on stage, over the next near three hours, was something quite different. Somehow evoking Hamlet, Woyzek, Trainspotting, and Naked (Mike Leigh's) all at the same time, here is a story about the futility and wonder of life -- trainwreck marriages (and great ones), diseases, desire, disappointment, fantasies, mutating definitions of success, and death -- the things that humans living in society are all supposed to experience. The desire for and the impotency in rebellion against those things, in the raging attempt to "get out of here."

Krum comes home "from abroad" (though God knows where he's been) decidedly without any gifts or stories. The one thing he has accomplished, he announces proudly, is to avoid getting married. He comes home to his mother, who, like any mother, wants him to live (i.e. make some money at some job, marry a girl and produce offspring). And for the following many years that unfold, everyone around his life does just that. All of this living is happening (albeit painfully, albeit glumly) and Krum alone stands to the periphery of it all, the perpetual observer. Years pass, and his mother still implored him to get a life, but he refuses -- he is a writer, and artist, and cannot be bothered with those kinds of things, and he has just begun (finally) his new novel... and he is still chasing after some impossible fantasy.

It's hard to imagine the portrayal of such a glum existence and environment is pulled off without making the audience want to hang themselves -- but the inventive stage compositions with occasional video montages of modern-day Israel and live feed from the stage, and the rough edges, raw energy, and extreme emotional commitment of the performers, bring incredible amount of compassion and life to a play about how life is meaningless.

about a girl...

...who finds her true self in deceipt

me: I saw lust caution by the way

1:11 PM alannalanners: oooh, what did you think?

me: i thought it was a pretty great movie,

i didn't feel the same way you did about the first half being hollywood war movie

also, so many pp had talked to me about the sex, that it didn't seem so intense to me

but i enjoyed it...

1:12 PM i liked how it was about this young girl learning how to engage with the world and find an identity through "performance"

but that in the face of the guy, in the bedroom, the rules were different

alannalanners: yeah, it's interesting. i think the way it ends is pretty great

1:13 PM me: i felt like it was about her journey to grasp what is REAL in life

i also liked how she went from being so naive

1:14 PM god,

it was so painful to watch her set the standard for loyalty

when she didn't really know ANYTHING

alannalanners: yeah, it was painful

1:15 PM i thought at the end you'd just hear she'd been killed, so it was surprising and pretty cool to see her lined up with the whole gang at the end....she took them all down in a way

1:16 PM i was a little confused by the whole diamond thing though...did you feel like the gesture of him giving her the diamond really signified some kind of true love for her?

1:17 PM me: no not love

but yeah the diamond was weird

but i think irwin put it in a really great way

that she had been able to connect with this monster

in his deepest surviving HUMAN part,

and that that connection was a REAL thing,

1:18 PM and that the diamond symbolized like in actual physical terms

the realness of that connection

and that was when she realized she could not betray the one thing she felt as real

alannalanners: yes, that's eloquent

that makes sense

1:19 PM cause at the time part of me was like "come on girl that's just a big ole cheesy diamond"

me: right right

that's what i thought too

because "ring" just implicates all this other stuff about love & marriage

1:20 PM alannalanners: yeah

1:22 PM me: hey can i rip off this chat session and post it on my blog?

alannalanners: sure dollface

i didn't get it

I'm assuming nobody reads this blog, really. Except for sometimes Irwin and Kayoko, maybe Maha. Which is fine, because I can dare to be honest and stay in the habit of writing down my thoughts.

On Monday night I went to see the opening of John Jesurun's Philoktetes. John is really famous. He was a recipient of one of them Macarthur GENIUS awards, and he is something of a downtown theater icon-legend. The theater was packed with the downtown crowd. Young Jean Lee was there (hadn't seen her since Vienna), Mallory, Brooke O'Harra, the redhead dude from Wooster group, actors, directors, designers, auteurs. Boy there is nothing like a room of theater artists that makes me want to run away screaming. I mean, it's not that I don't like them, I actually do like them quite a bit. But you know. I feel self-conscious in those situations.

The set was simple and elegant. Projection surface covering a large square on the floor, and also a screen suspended at an angle from the sky -- both projection surface displaying (for most of the time) the same moving images of crashing waves/liquid cloudy skies, rustling green forest, etc. Also there was a camera set up upstage center, which could supply live audio and video feed to the suspended screen. Sometimes actors would go up there, and their faces would fill the entire screen. The actors were more than competent -- grounded and limber with the dense text.

So what was my overall experience of the show? I didn't get it. I'm sorry. I don't know why the script jumped around so much from that dry historical tone in one moment, to super colloquial the next ("What does he look like?" "His face is like an aubergine dressed in garlic sauce."); I didn't know why everything was delivered in this deadpan way, and then suddenly, for reasons not easily discernible to me, jolt into a hyper-emotive moment (an attack, a kiss, a shouting match); I don't know what the story was about and why it mattered at all. This style of detached theater seems to be all in vogue this decade, and I feel like an old fuddy-duddy but I have to admit I just don't get it. Like Richard Maxwell's stuff? (Ironic humor at the expense of the characters -- wait make that a triple dose of irony) And the Wooster Group's stuff as well. That accentuated separation between text and intention and movement -- it seems more impotent rather than powerful, in the contexts of their work. Someone enlighten me.

the grotesque

The two Dairakudakan Kochuten shows at work got great notices in the press, but frankly I wasn't thrilled. Maybe because I remembered their previous visits to New York so vividly. Back in 2002, they dropped into a sweltering New York summer for a series of shows that were totally fascinating, fun and exciting. There was a parade of men with sausages sticking out of their thongs -- and a hag-demon who cut off their "phalli" and weighed them on a scale, cackling; there was an underground society of creatures who sawed off their the crown of their victim's skull and ate his still-living brain; a strange slo-mo wedding procession complete with accompanying horses and stolen kisses to Andrea Bocelli's Time to Say Goodbye. Deliciously kitschy stuff.

Their latest pieces, Tiger's Cave and Yupiters did not captivate the way the other pieces did. The all-male Tiger's Cave, created by Kumotaro Mukai, was a comic imagining of a training camp for butoh dancer. An air of austerity, discipline, and asceticism is disrupted when one of their fellow trainees (or is it a teacher?) returns from a journey abroad sipping a cup of espresso and bearing gifts: a flag of France, a baguette, a pair of salt and pepper shakers, and a whip. His sauntering in to the theme song from The Triplets of Belleville infects the group and soon they've all given up the rigid butoh life for the Parisian one. At the height of this joyous revelry, the phone rings. With trepidation one of them answers. Whatever he hears on the receiver is enough to render him paralyzed and speechless. He hands the phone off to another trainee and the same thing happens to him. The third guy is finally able to spit out the words in terror: "CLEAN UP!" The pupils scamper around to destroy any evidence of their moment of fun to greet the return of their next teacher: a man/horse whose limbs are balanced precariously on the traditional Japanese laquerware. He clomps about noisily and wears a bizarre bit-like brace in his mouth that keeps his teeth perpetually bared. And so it goes on for a while. The concept is not uninteresting, but it was the indulgence and pacing that killed it for me. A reminder that what makes for a stunning picture cannot hold its own without a smart sense of time and timing.


Yupiters, the all-female companion piece by Yuko Kobayashi, proved to be much more esoteric. An ethereal trance-like landscape of ever-shifting images. The ensemble of women transformed themselves time and again, with elaborate costume changes and with extraordinary contortions. Gigantic fishbowls (with live fish) dangled from the sky. Mirrored panels surrounded the gathering, undulating wildly, creating an overload of visual information. The climax of the piece in which Kobayashi, painted entirely in silver, is surrounded by a throng of village women who prod and provoke her (without ever really touching her) and she is left to spasmodically churn and convulse, much like a fish out of water. For all its intensity and spectacle, this piece, too, left me feeling rather unmoved. Like eating at a super-fancy restaurant -- each dish looks so gorgeous, but does little to actually satisfy your hunger.

In the middle of the run I went to see the Red Bastard at the Brick Theater's NY Clown Festival. It was the 3rd time I'd seen him. While he certainly hit the mark I couldn't help but feel like he was under the weather, because he didn't wrangle his audience with the nonchalant ease with which I've seen him do so in the past. Nonetheless, he remains one of my favorite performers of that ilk -- if you've never seen him, you must, you must, you must.

what will happen to the kids?

Lloyd Suh's latest play, The Children of Vonderly, produced by Ma-Yi, is a story about an unusual Midwestern family of disabled people of all kinds of background who were adopted by the Jewish couple the Vonderlys, and what happens when the patriarch of the family dies. Well, what happens is, the widowed mom goes batty, the mentally impaired "kids" are left to fend for themselves while the physically impaired (but lucid) siblings fall in love with each other and run away -- or at least try to. The children of the Vonderly household are no longer children, really, so the play is really about their struggle for independence and their pursuit of happiness. It's a theatrically conventional play, but very well-acted all around. But I can't help feeling like the metaphor of the play was somehow being obscured by all the good acting, uber-realistic speech patterns, and set changes executed by stagehands in black. I mean, this play isn't really about disabled people and their struggle for independent lives, is it? It seems like if that were the point, the play should have been cast with actors who were actually disabled -- all actors were decidedly NOT disabled (as evidenced by their quick transitions in blackouts) except for Stephen Jutras who is a dwarf. Towards the end of the play, the writer (and the protagonist) seemed more interested swimming in the slick banter than actual catharsis or change.