there is no end

Last year (2009) I got married and had a baby. So I didn't much get to the theater. I just stopped wanting to be in the theater. In fact i stopped wanting to do anything that had to do with culture or literature. I could barely read a book. I read one book in 2009 and it was Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris which was pretty darned entertaining. It got a bit mushy towards the end for my taste, but I guess the world needs things to tie themselves up into a nice package. Dan R gave me the book for Christmas 2008. Although I guess he doesn't celebrate Christmas (Jew) so it was really just a friendly holiday gift. Such a sweet guy.


Anyway I did see another show after the baby popped out. It has been hard to find a way to get out of the house by myself to go to the theater -- it seems like such a luxury now. It forces me to find value even in the lousiest shows. Jeremy Wade's there is no end to more, however, was not at all a lousy show. I think I appreciated it more, now that a month has gone by since I saw it. Starring Jared Gradinger, who I saw in Constanza Macras' piece(s), this children's TV show on acid x poop + manga had some really amazing chunks of text in it -- scatological in tone which I love. The movement was nuanced and precisely executed, but I didn't really "get" into it. It was a really well made show -- like the show that the Big Arts Gourp wanted to be but couldn't.

Nothing New

Went to see Jan Fabre's Orgy of Tolerance.
Imagine an evening of competitive masturbation, cock-sucking, furniture-fucking, rifle-barrel-butt-fucking, a room full of guys getting hand jobs while discussing their collection of ethnic humans, torturing people for the sake of consumerism, and a litany of 'fuck you's aimed at every single conceivably religious/ethnic/gender/sexual orientation group you can think of.
Shocking?
On the contrary. It was sophomoric, predictable, shallow and also felt terribly outdated, by like 30 years. I couldn't believe that this was the new work by the leader of the Flemish Wave -- it felt more like some college student's first self-made dance-theater piece (in fact it did remind me of the works of a few college acquaintances), except with an enormous budget.
The performers were all very talented and could obviously move, but their energies were embarrassingly wasted on a fetid work.

Kicking off 2009

Let it be a year of succinct blog posts.

I was deeply disappointed with The Seagull on Broadway, particularly the performances by MacKenzie Crooke who seemed to shout all his lines at the same pitch, and Peter Saarsgaard, who seemed just totally bored out of his mind -- and not appealing at all.

I survived Yoshiko Chuma & Shirotama Hitsujiya's X2. I continue to be astounded by their (collective) audacity.

I have now made three failed attempts to see Witness Relocation's The Blue Bird. My only remaining chance this Friday.

I saw only one show at Under the Radar this year, and that was the bizarre show by the Netherlands' Kassys called LIGA 50% Reward 50% Punishment. The opening film is delightful, tracking a backstage view as one by one, the performers of a show make their exit and greet their director to celebrate how well the show had gone. The reactions vary subtly, but the general feeling is that of relief and elation. Then the performers' parents come out of the green room and begin to slowly zup up their children in their coats and escort them home. Somwhere, we've made a transition in perception. What we at first thought were 'normal' adults have turend out to be somehow mentally/psychologically impaired (autistic?) people. Then the play begins in earnest, rewinding back to the beginning of the show. Each actor makes his/her entrance and interacts with the stage props, audience and each other. We seem to be watching at once some kind of socialization experiment, a performance made of trying to teach 'normal' 'acceptable' behavior, and a reality tv show. At the height of the chaos, one girl begins to disrobe and flaunt herself and others flail about with large cushions, vying for the audiences' attention, until the director finally intervenes and demands that the group create a cohesive event together: a BBQ party.

Though rhythmically the show falters in the middle, and I started to feel like I had been a kindergarten class for about 3 hours (exhausting!) the show was a pretty committed (if shallow) commentary on social/societal acceptance and interaction.

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.

wade in retards

Fall is officially upon us. I need a light jacket or sweatshirt now. And the performance season has commenced. Which means a lot of manic running around for me.

To kick off the fall, I was fortunate enough to see Jeremy Wade's latest -- a group piece (a quintet to be precise) from the Bessie-winning American choreographer based in Berlin: ...and pulled out their hair at Joyce Soho. Apparently this piece was originally slated for PS122 but for unclear reasons made the move to Soho instead.

The first five minutes of the piece absolutely thrilled me.

When we walked in, there was one man standing on the white marleyed, white-walled stage. He was a rather big man, a rugged handsome type, dressed in a white short sleeve button-down shirt and black tie and slacks. He stood at the edge of the marley and surveyed the audience coming in with shifty eyes, twitching shoulders, and insipidly creepy grin. At times convulsing, and other times leering, he was the very image of a barely checked homicidal child molester or a developmentally impaired sexual deviant of some sort. After a while, 4 others entered upstage left, stumbling haltingly. Those were two women (in short black skirts and white blouses) and two men (in white button-down short sleeves, black shorts and suspenders), all, like our first man, somehow not completely in control of their physical and mental faculties. The group altogether seemed to form a school or society of degenerates, indeed, a grotesque portrayal of our own culture.

Throughout the course of the piece, this team of squealing, drooling freaks tumbled, stumbled, clambered, wrestled, fought, fucked, sniffed and embraced each other, at times demonizing, and at others, coddling each other -- as if they were the purest representation of the human id, bursting with uncontrollable desires. At one point, the performers faced the audience in a line and opened up their faces to an extreme. And their faces remained that way for the rest of the performance, suspended in a state of total shock or an unending yawn or expression of utter vapid idiocy, depending on what you wanted to see. After a while I began to see their wide-open saliva-secreting mouths as body parts as intimate as flowering anuses -- in fact the whole performance seemed to be some twisted inversion of the order imposed on us writhing breathing wild humans by the system we call society.

Though unlike much dance I see this work was very dramatic (in terms of describing a sequence of events and interactions amongst people), it somehow lacked a rhythmic drive to pull the audience from one excruciating portrayal of the human condition to the next. Clocking in at just under an hour, it presented a rich if a bit tired (and very very sweaty) view of human nature.

Summer of love...

In SUMMER'04, Miriam, a German woman, mid to late 30's, is married to a loving badminton-playing scholar, and she is on vacation by the lake with her husband, her glum 15-year-old son, and his 12-year-old Lolita-like girlfriend Livia who thinks it's ok to have sex with lots of different people. One day, while her son and his girlfriend are at the lake, they encounter a 30-something German-American man (Bill), who, enchanted by Livia takes command of the sailboat, sends her son packing and spends the entire day out on the lake with the 12-year-old. Livia is clearly drawn to this man, and next day goes off to his house and doesn't come back? What to do?

Go to his house, fall in love with him and have a torrid affair with him of course.

What begins as a seemingly interesting representation of rational, mature German family behavior quickly disintegrates with the entrance of the American stranger, but it's really not that the newcomer possesses such mysterious powers, but that the veneer of maturity and rationality was completely flimsy and false to begin with. Miriam becomes obsessed with her extramarital affair with Bill, and when Bill tries to break it off because he is earnestly in love with Livia (the adolescent girl), Miriam swears to never allow him to see her again. An accident on the sailboat leaves Livia with a nasty bump on the head and by the time they reach shore, Livia is dead. Miriam leaves her husband for Bill, the scholar father takes his frustration out on his son -- the father-son duo both emasculated, impotent and pathetic.

What is this movie about, really? Not sure, it was kind of an absurd soap opera about two unlikely romances and the destruction of relationships by very selfish people. It's difficult to watch an outrageous human drama when you don't care much about the protagonists.

Silents Speak More / Save Me from lolcatz

I've been on a silent movie kick of late with Tmonkey, a welcome relief considering my language skills have been rapidly deteriorating since my introduction to the world of lolcatz, an extremely disturbing phenomenon which need not be expounded upon here... (except I'll just say that it makes me seriously fear for our society, as it sinks further into meaningless, saccharine infantilism)

ANYWAY, it all began when I'd netflixed the French film Irma Vep, starring the gorgeous but surprisingly kind of vacant Maggie Cheung. Tmonkey claimed to have seen the movie before, but he did not seem to remember any of it. Irma Vep is a film about making a film based on another film, taking a rather pragmatic and exasperating look at the process of film-making (with all its idiosyncratic power dynamics, drama and chaos). The moment this film became interesting to me was when they showed clips of the original silent movie that the filmmakers in Irma Vep were attempting to re-create: Louis Feuillade's 1915 silent serial Les Vampires.



This was absolutely fascinating. Through the same highly-stylized acting that I associated with the American silents, but entirely different in aesthetics from Chaplin or Keaton movies, here was an intriguing, dark thriller-mystery: a reporter's dogged pursuit of an enigmatic band of thieves calling themselves the Vampires have been terrorizing Paris. Merciless killings, kidnappings, secret tunnels, underground performances, poison ink pens abound. Totaling 7 hours (I think we're only at hour 2.5) this enthralling film experience proves how great story-telling in the cinema need not depend on text-language.

This sent us off hunting for more from Feuillade, when Tmonkey happened to receive an announcement for an event at the Morgan Library: a screening of the famed 1919 silent German film in five acts Das Kabinett der Doktor Caligari accompanied by live music by Richard Marriott's Club Foot Orchestra.



A psychological thriller about a man who is probing into the truth behind the sudden and violent murder of his friend and rival in love. His pursuits lead him to a madman-psychiatrist who has trained a somnambulist to murder. Through surprising plot revelations and riveting gestural performances, this film toys with the audience perspective/perception of in/sanity; I began to see this film as a sort of progenitor to Jan Svankmajer's truly grotesque psycho-horror live-action Lunacy. I wish Svankmajer would do something with lolcatz to completely pervert and obliterate that inane cute culture. That would be something to see. Oh that just reminded me of this video Banana sent me a while back.



Oh god help me, the lolcatz are taking over my brain! I am in ur Kabinett vomiting Cheezburger!?

Berlin, Berlin

I'm back, I'm back, I'm back from Berlin. A sprawling flat city that somehow reminded me of San Francisco pre-internet days: grimey and laid-back, funky and functional. I did not have much organizational time to plan out my theater-going itinerary, so it was basically pure luck that I found in my Ex-Berliner mag that the latest from Constanza Macras/Dorky Park was playing at The Prater in Prenzlauer Berg. Following a gorgeous Russian meal at Pasternak, I went to stand in line for an available ticket to the sold-out show of I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE PART TWO.


You may or may not recall that Dorky Park was the company that made one of my top 3 show in 2006 so I was excited to see this new one, and compare it to my experience of the other show. And, well I wouldn't say I was disappointed, but I do feel like I have now seen a clear isolation of the creative formula -- and like anything magical, once you see its mechanism clearly, a certain mystique and ineffable wonder wear off. back to the present, which I saw at DTW last year, was an explosive, sweaty, wild, youthful, funny, sexy collage of pop-culture and personal narratives. I'm not the only one presented a similar series of vignettes, at times invoking that same kind of indie-rock energy, but with a smaller cast. And the focus seemed to be on intimacy -- the strange desires and contradictions we experience one-on-one with each other, and as an individual within a group. There were vague references to Twin Peaks, violent dance duets, a massive cream pie fight, and a balls-to-the-wall karaoke singing session, a bizarre and beautiful contortionist Gail Sharrol Skrela pitting will against body performed by the intense Hyoung Min Kim. Unlike back to the present, this piece seemed to lose its steam and arc. back to the present, with all its randomness and schitzophrenic jumping around held together energetically and moved from a fun-kitsch to something more grounded and profound. I'm not spent a lot of time circling in a holding pattern, and by the time the amazing Korean singing burst out, the piece had lost my attention. Partly it could have been that I missed Part One, and also, the theater had become unbearably hot and uncomfortable. It certainly felt like the piece could have used an editor.

The following night I went to see another performance -- I'd come across a flyer for Mustafa-Woyzeck at the Theaterdiscounter. The theater was on the ground floor of this amazing building in Mitte. The show, which was, granted, entirely in German, seemed to be a very superficial deconstructed look at Buchner's incomplete play through the lens of a Turkish-German DJ. Language and jet-lag aside, the music was uninventive, the actors unengaging, and they certainly did not earn the final image in the show: a big pudgy Woyzeck pouring a bucket of blood on himself. Oh that just reminded me of another horrible Woyzeck I saw at St. Ann's Warehouse last year -- Daniel Kramer's London "rock and roll" production was, asides from the stark opening image, a dreadfully predictable and oversimplified plastic version of one of the most influential plays in Western theater.