Postcard from New York, Minneapolis and Chicago
The Sound and the Fury (Elevator
Repair Service); Macbeth (Public
Theatre Mobile Shakespeare Unit); Wise
Blood (The Soap Factory/Walker Art Centre); Moby Dick (Looking Glass Theatre)
It’s almost
six weeks since I arrived in New York to begin the fourth month of my
Fellowship, after spending the first three in the UK and Europe. So much has
happened since then – in my personal life as well as in terms of the
performance training and research that’s been at the core of my itinerary –
that I’ve had neither the time nor the mental space to write. The next few
Postcards will I hope make up for my long silence, at least in terms of the
theatre I’ve seen, the context in which I’ve seen it, and the reflections it’s
inspired.
I initially
touched down in New York for a mere two days, before continuing on to
Minneapolis for a two-week workshop with physical improvisation company The Bodycartography
Project. On this first brief stopover in Manhattan, I stayed in a small shared
apartment on the Lower East Side overlooking 2nd Avenue, just around
corner from the heart of the Off-Broadway theatre scene. My Airbnb host was a nervy
young guy who was keen to show me his business card, which declared him to be
in the Bedbug Detection industry – a thriving concern in New York apparently.
He then introduced me to his business partner and chief asset, a friendly and
rather excitable beagle whom he’d invested a great deal of time and money in
training. He insisted on demonstrating the dog’s prowess by hiding a small
plastic vial of bedbugs in the living room and then encouraging her to sniff
them out, but after a cursory search she seemed more interested in joining me
on the sofa.
Only in New
York.
*
The day
after my arrival I stroll a couple of blocks across town to The Public Theatre
to see a three-hour matinee performance of The
Sound and the Fury: a restaging by experimental ensemble Elevator Repair
Service of the first chapter of William Faulkner’s great modernist novel; the production originally premiered at The New York Theatre Workshop in 2008. The chapter in question is a
stream-of-consciousness narrative recording the sensations and memories (the various
strands being interwoven and often barely distinguishable) of an intellectually
disabled thirty-three-year-old man with a mental age of three who belongs to a declining
aristocratic Southern family which includes his hyperchondriacal mother, his
two surviving but unstable brothers, and his sexually wayward sister, as well
as the struggling family of black servants who support them. It’s an almost
impossible task to stage it – and in a way that’s the whole point.
I’ve seen
two other productions by ERS that have toured to Australia over the years: the
monumental Gatz, a seven-hour verbatim
rendering of The Great Gatsby, which
was read aloud by one of the cast, while he and the others also took on roles
in the story; and The Select, a more
playful (and more play-like) staging of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. The Sound and The Fury completes the company’s
‘American trilogy’, which by no means exhausts or even defines their repertoire
or focus, as their work has ranged from stagings of court transcripts to
original commissioned plays. If anything, I’d describe them as an ensemble
company with a special interest in the suspension of disbelief – that uniquely
theatrical gap between form and content that lies between what’s seen and heard
onstage and what occurs in the mind’s eye of the audience. Hence their attraction
to staging works of literature precisely as ‘impossible tasks’, an approach
which resembles less a conventional process of adaptation than an expanded notion
of verbatim theatre.
They’re led
by director John Collins, formerly an associate with The Wooster Group, with
whom he worked primarily as a sound designer, and whose directorial approach is
primarily task-based rather than prescriptive. Productions are developed over
long periods of time by allowing the cast to solve problems and generate
material themselves in response to proposed texts. In other words, he creates
the conditions of possibility for them to make their own performances, which he
then shapes and edits in production. This permits a sense of ownership and
freedom on the part of the performers which is immediately evident when watching
them onstage. It’s like watching kids playing in front of your eyes, in a state
of focused flow.
In the
event, The Sound and The Fury is a
much more demanding production (and novel) than Gatz or The Select. If perhaps it doesn’t quite realise itself as
completely or successfully as its precursors, this is arguably also true of the
sprawling, incomplete and patchwork nature of Faulkner’s novel, in comparison
with the gem-like perfection of Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s respective
masterpieces. That said, I loved it; but then, I love the novel; and in both
cases, it’s the magnificently quixotic failure of the exercise that’s an
essential part of what I love about them; whereas the incredible feat of Gatz in particular was precisely the
fact that it completely succeeded – and in doing so staged The Great Gatsby in a way that was far truer to the form and
content of the novel than the excruciatingly sentimental and glamourized film
versions.
As with Gatz, there’s no attempt with The Sound and the Fury to turn
Faulkner’s novel (if it can even be described as such) into a play. A copy of
the book gets passed around the stage and is sometimes read from (and sometimes
not); the text is read or spoken more or less verbatim, including the words ‘he
said’ or ‘she said’, which are hastily appended to lines of dialogue; actors
play multiple characters, and (perhaps more confusingly) the same characters
are played by multiple actors; the cast are diverse in terms of age, gender,
appearance and cultural background, but there’s often a deliberate disregard
and even tension between this and the characters they play. Some actors use
‘Southern’ accents, others not; costumes vary between contemporary streetclothes
and makeshift signifiers of role; the set is a highly detailed, naturalistic and
cluttered living room which in no way attempts to reproduce any literal setting
from the novel, although the mélange of old furniture and family heirlooms
evokes the echo-chamber of memory which is arguably its proper mental space;
and there’s a similarly detailed use of sound (and sound effects) which
resembles radio drama and is at times almost comically mimetic but at other
times only tangentially related to the narrative.
Despite and
even because of all this, the novel emerges for me with all the force and
clarity of a hidden image in a picture-puzzle. In fact I’ve never experienced
such a vivid rendition in the theatre of the imaginative process of reading
itself – and reading this novel in particular. The slippages of time, place, character,
memory and sensation correspond to those in Faulkner’s writing, and to Benjy’s
consciousness (the title is of course a reference to Macbeth’s lines about life
being ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’). No
doubt, there’s a very New York tendency towards irony and intellectualisation in all this; in a way, ERS remains me of a smart, cool band like Talking
Heads or Television in their heyday; but like those bands, their work is also edgy, funny, captivating and at times filled with a sharply aching
sense of yearning. One would be hard pressed to find theatre of this
intelligence and sophistication anywhere else; nor a genuine ensemble company like
this, led by a director who knows how to throw his actors a bone and then let
them go for it.
*
That night
I return to The Public Theatre on impulse, to see an in-house production of Macbeth by the Public’s Mobile
Shakespeare Unit, which creates and tours work to prisons, shelters, recreation
centers and other community-based sites. Running at about 70 minutes without an
interval, it’s a lean, mean, heavily edited version of the play, which suits
Shakespeare’s most episodic and randomly structured tragedy (especially in the
later Acts, where whole scenes and characters can easily be cut without loss).
The
production is lively and simple, and the performances have an engagingly
natural sense of vernacular speech and body-language which is generally absent
in Australian versions of Shakespeare, where actors often seem either trapped
in a dated notion of ‘Englishness’ or equally artificial notions of
‘Australianness’, both of which are abiding symptoms of the cultural cringe
that still afflicts us back home. The actor playing Macbeth is compelling,
although I can’t help sensing a degree of self-involvement which gets in the
way at times of the character and the verse; there’s a lot of extended pauses,
eyeballing of the audience and other actors, and interpolated extra-syllabic
grunts. Perhaps it reflects the intended performance context and audience for
which the show was devised; or perhaps it’s flip-side of the vernacular quality
I mentioned earlier – Macbeth meets On the Waterfront, so to speak. In this
respect, perhaps there’s an American version of the cultural cringe, too, which
manifests itself in the inverted form of a perpetual posture of rebellious defiance, as epitomised by the most famous graduates of The Actor’s Studio, from Brando and James Dean to Jack
Nicholson, Pacino and De Niro. To be sure, the play is at least in part about disloyalty, but making its titular lead a rebel without a cause somewhat short-circuits the journey of his character.
In any
case, something essential about Shakespeare gets lost in translation. I think
it’s the heightened externalization of character, action, cosmos, and the
language that expresses them – which is precisely what speaks to us across time
and space. This is a play about witches and kings, ghosts and visions, heaven
and hell, and ‘Pity, like a naked newborne babe, striding the blast’. If we
don’t hear and see these things as if they were real, and not just the
trappings of history or rhetoric, then in the end it’s all just ‘sound and
fury, signifying nothing’.
*
I left New
York the next day, for two weeks in Minneapolis, where I spent my time in the
workshop with Bodycartography. Here I experienced the best of ‘Minnesota nice’,
staying in a charming sloping-roofed house with my delightful host and her
daughter in the suburb of Longfellow, on a peaceful street lined with maples and
populated by rabbits and squirrels hopping about on the front lawns and darting up
and down the trees. My host lent me her bike, and I rode each day to the
Tapestry Folk Dance Centre where the workshop was held. On weekends I made good
use of the bike paths and greenways that traverse the city, and visited the
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Walker Art Centre, and closer to hand in
Longfellow, the mighty Mississippi and Minnehaha Falls. I was in the Midwest
all right.
I didn’t
see any theatre – apart from an ambitious but disappointing opera based on
Flannery O’Connor’s cult Southern Gothic novel Wise Blood. Actually it was more of an immersive-promenade
site-specific installation-performance, co-commissioned by the Walker Art Centre and staged in the haunting environs of The
Soap Factory, a rehabilitated found-venue in downtown Minneapolis.
As is often
the case with site-specific theatre, the existing architecture and visual
design were the outstanding features, with one of the show’s creators, Chris
Larson, constructing an intricate set within the space for the audience and
performers to wander through and inhabit. I was less impressed by the work of
his co-creators: composer and librettist Anthony Gatto, and director Michael
Sommers (who also performed in the show). The score was woefully uninteresting
and (dare I say) one-note in mood and tempo (which is to say, relentlessly
dirge-like, and utterly unsuited to the spiky and unpredictable nature of
O’Connor’s writing); and the libretto was a clumsy attempt to foreshorten and reshuffle
the structure of the novel, which lead to an incoherent Frankenstein’s monster
that could satisfy neither newcomers nor afficionados. As for the direction: it
failed to grapple with the elemetary challenge of immersive-promenade
performance, which is both to justify and facilitate the audience having to
remain on their feet while continually being herded around.
I’ll have
more to say about immersive and participatory theatre in the context of other
shows I saw on my return to New York. Suffice to say that it’s become something
of a craze at the moment, for reasons that I suspect have a lot to do with the
influence of virtual reality and so-called reality TV (I say
‘so-called’ because of course the ‘reality’ in question is anything but real). This
is not to gainsay the potential of the form; but without sufficient motivation in terms of content or craft in delivery the result can be little more than an
elaborate gimmick, and this felt like the case here.
In sum:
despite some outstanding work from the singers, actors, musicians and scenic
artist, the creative minds behind Wise
Blood left the unfortunate performers and audience high and dry – in other
words, unable to connect with each other, or the story itself. Of course we all
applauded dutifully at the end, with a sense of having been present at an
important artistic achievement and cultural event; but I doubt whether anyone
got much pleasure or enlightenment out of being there.
*
A week
later, my workshop completed, I took the train back across the Midwest from
Minneapolis to Chicago en route to New York, feeling a little like Nick
Carraway at the end of The Great Gatsby, only in reverse. I decided to break my journey and
spend a night and a day in Chicago: a city which struck me as kind of
playground for architects, especially when it comes to skyscrapers from every
era and in every conceivable style imaginable over the last century or so. I
stayed in a hotel housed in a slender 1920s neo-gothic example sandwiched
between two multistorey carparks on the Chicago River in the heart of downtown,
directly opposite the glass-and-steel monstrosity of Trump Tower.
That night
I went to hear Ricardo Muti conducting the Chicago Symphony. It was an
all-Russian program: Tchaikovsky’s ‘Manfred’ Symphony preceded by Scriabin’s
‘Poem of Ecstasy’. Personally I found the Tchaikovsky a bloated and meandering work with
some beautiful melodies but long stretches of uninspired histrionics, despite
Muti’s best efforts to keep me focussed. The Scriabin on the other hand was
wonderful: Debussy meets Richard Strauss, with a large dollop of Russian
mysticism thrown in for good measure. I had a cheap seat up in the choir behind
the orchestra, and the final climax (eight horns and an organ) almost blew the
top of my head off (as Hemingway might have put it), as well as threatening to
cause several coronary infarctions among the senior citizens of Chicago sitting
alongside me.
*
*
The
following morning I explored some of the architetural delights of the city,
including the Chicago Cultural Centre (formerly the Chicago Public Library), an impressive late-19th Century neo-classical structure which is open to the
community with an ongoing program of free exhibitions and concerts. Walking up
the marble stairway into the vast hall where people once collected their books
– surrounded by walls decorated with elaborate tiled mosaics under a huge Tiffany
coloured-glass dome – was like entering the Mermaid’s Palace in Hans Andersen
(or perhaps the Doge’s Palace in Venice). Upstairs was a (for me) revelatory
exhibition of paintings by Jazz Age black artist Archibald Motley, who lived
and worked in Chicago, Paris and finally Mexico, featuring vibrant and
provocative images of street life in the black neighbourhoods of Chicago and
Paris in the 1920s and 30s. They reminded me a little of the
post-Expressionist ‘new objectivity’ and social caricature art of Georg Grosz,
Otto Dix and Max Beckmann in Germany around the same time.
That
afternoon I went to see a new stage version of Moby Dick, adapted and directed by David Caitlin for Chicago-based
company Looking Glass Theatre. The performance went for about three hours,
including two intervals and lots of gymnastics, aerial and trapeze work on
ropes and swings, and climbing up and down a framework of curved metal
scaffolding which was arched over the stage like the ribcage of a whale.
Melville meets Cirque de Soleil. I wasn’t convinced. Performances from most of
the cast (the men in particular) were disappointingly hammy. Much of the time,
it felt like watching a Classics Illustrated comic-book version of the novel. The
whales themselves were rather intriguingly represented by the women in the cast,
variously singing, being hung upside down and having their long fabric dresses
unwound and stripped from them like blubber (revealing the whalebone corsets
beneath), and finally taking their revenge by dragging the leg-strapped Ahab
offstage in a disappointingly lame climax (if you’ll pardon the pun).
It’s too
bad the film of Orson Welles’s Moby Dick –
Rehearsed hasn’t survived. Welles approached the adaptation of the novel as
a metatheatrical exercise in representing the unrepresentable, using the framing
device of an imaginary theatre company who stage the book using minimal
resources (and casting himself as the Actor-Manager who takes on the role Ahab,
needless to say). I can imagine seeing a compnay like Elevator Repair Service
take a similar approach today.
Reflecting
on the experience of seeing this and other literary adaptations on my travels,
it struck me that the first thing to acknowledge about the task of putting
works of literature onstage is what Freud (in relation to the work of dreams) called
‘considerations of representability’. In the case of Moby Dick, this means recognising that the whale is first and
foremost a being of language – a figure of speech, so to speak – and perhaps
even an instance of what Lacan would call (with no pun intended) ‘a floating
signifier’. In short: the whale represents an idea in Ahab’s mind: a 'fatal image', and perhaps even an obsession, driven by what Freud called the death instinct. As
such, it surely belongs offstage – a literally ‘obscene’ object of desire (from
the Greek ob skene, meaning ‘off-stage’)
that can’t appear or be represented directly, much like Macbeth’s ‘dagger of
the mind’ (a symbolic phallus if every there was one: ‘Come, let me clutch
thee; I have thee not, and yet I see thee still!’). Perhaps it's this dimension of the
off-stage, the absent, the Symbolic, which makes the staging of literature (and
indeed everything else, including desire itself) possible: in the theatre, in our
dreams and fantasies, and even in the unconscious acting-out of our lives.
That night
I boarded the train again, feeling more and more like Nick Carroway, to
continue my long journey east: back to New York City, where more thrills and
spills – theatrical and personal – awaited me.
*
Humph’s second Postcard from New York follows
next week.
No comments:
Post a Comment