Obscene Jester

don't wanna be an american idiot

Last night I attended a lovely conversation at NYU between Professor Bob Vorlicky and Michael Mayer, director of Broadway’s most recent transfer, American Idiot, which is opening tonight. For a man with one Broadway show beginning previews that night, and another opening the next, he was delightfully composed and charming, and I thoroughly enjoyed hearing the ins and outs of how a concept album by a pop-punk band made it to B’way.

Of course, I do feel a bit bad that I’ve been somewhat dismissive of the show, but I’ll readily admit that Dookie was a defining album of my adolescence (whereas Mayer admitted it wasn’t), and so to stage them on the Great White Way is an affront to the rebellious teenager in me, not to mention the hard-shelled academic I’ve become, dubious of the commercialism that reigns supreme in contemporary performance.

That being said, Mayer made an incredibly valuable point about the role musicals play in the wider culture and its evolution: he compared American Idiot to musicals of the 20s and 30s, when the music existed outside the realm of the performance. In fact, the music was pervasive in popular culture, many times preceding the theatre pieces they would become part of. He specifically alluded to Ethel Merman singing Gershwin, and how the music wasn’t relegated to the insulated culture of Broadway; indeed, they were the same songs one would hear at the dance halls or bars after the show. In other words, there was a cultural permeation between pop music and theatre back in the day, that went the way of the dodo once more “integrated” musicals came on the scene. One could even say that for the exact reason Oklahoma! is renowned for its shift in form is the very same reason musical theatre became less pertinent to culture in general.

 

Mayer said that he hoped recent trends, including American Idiot (and I would add phenomena like Glee or High School Musical, as much as we may love to hate them), are bringing musical theatre full circle back to its Broadway and even vaudeville roots.

And, for the record, I will be seeing American Idiot soon. And from what I hear, it’s a phenomenal show. And even though I may not be able to feel it, I’ll certainly be able to appreciate it.

brief musings on laser beams, and how awesome they are

Believe it or not, friends, the Tweedster is often made fun of for what he considers to be his impeccable taste. I will fully admit that it tends to skew on either side of the bell curve: a Friday night will bring me to the Wooster Groups or Hot Tub Time Machines of the world, and this is no different in musical tastes. Did I clean my apartment today listening to Alban Berg's Lulu? Yes, yes I did.

But that doesn't mean that, despite what everyone else says, I didn't thoroughly enjoy Ke$ha's performance on SNL last night. "Tik Tok" is clearly my crap anthem of 2010. How can it be so wrong, when it feels so right? She is camp from heaven as far as I'm concerned; like Lady Gaga, but without all the artsy pretensions. The B-movie aesthetic also backs up my recent claims about the allegory of space exploration in contemporary performance.

And she played a laser harp. A LASER HARP, for chrissake. I know that lasers have been used quite a bit on SNL recently, but there's no such thing as too much laser.

Laser harp!!!

[Update: Kim Jong-Bod alerted me to a brilliant video on the existentialism of Ke$ha's meter from The Princeton Tiger.]

[pun on the word “enjoy” here]

I want a manga café in New York: a store where one can not only read manga, as the name implies, but also drink coffee, have a snack, rent a bed for a nap, take a shower, and on and on. In the bare breakroom of a manga café in Shinjuku (Tokyo’s answer to Times Square) is where we find ourselves for Enjoy, a new play by Toshiki Okada and staged by The Play Company at 59E59.

 The play is mostly a series of monologues by the employees about crushes and drama (love?) that volley back and forth in their store. Although it perpetuates the stereotypes about comic-book nerds, the comically awkward youths are pitch perfect in their portrayal of Generation Z-ers. In fact, the first trio we are presented with, Kris Kling, Frank Harts, and Kira Sternbach, are so perfect, in fact, they almost overshadow the quality and pace of the rest of the performance. The no-fouth-wall address to the audience is a delightful indication of how uncomfortable these characters are with physical, face-to-face interaction; they’d rather describe the hills and valleys of their emotional landscapes to a faceless crowd than the person they’re discussing, rocking back and forth on heels five feet away.

It seems as though Okada has tapped in to the Douglas Coupland ennui of a generation of Japanese kids who are facing a burgeoning freelance market—the certainty of uncertainty, the success of mediocrity. Okada and the company, as well as wonderful director Dan Rothenberg of the Pig Iron Theatre, do a marvelous job of bringing the personal into the political, and Enjoy is a marvelous glimpse into the social and cultural waters of Japan today.

But I’d like to give a particularly strong hooray to set designer Mimi Lien and lighting designer James Clotfelter, who have created one of the simplest yet meaningful spaces I’ve seen in sometime. The space is deceptively bare: ugly cream linoleum tile, patched, barren walls, and a single slit of a window to let the light of the day in to an otherwise neon jungle. Fluorescent lights, of course, abound. But look closer, and you can tell the New York-style tilt of the room—barely perceptible to the naked eye, but entirely noticeable if you put a ball or a nickel down in the top corner. Either will slowly pick up speed and tell you in which direction the foundations of the building are off. And it’s precisely this sterility unhinged that provides the mark of brilliance on the piece, and a wonderful reminder of how much designers can change the world.

The Play Company has an a amazing mission as well as a solid artistic team, and l look forward to more of their international delights.

"celebrity of the 1st rank": bloody bloody andrew jackson

In her new preface to the 10th (10th!) Anniversary Edition of No Logo, Naomi Klein goes on an extended meditation on Barack Obama as the first “branded” president. The posters, the slogans, the grassroots effort to transform a man into a lifestyle, Klein’s arguments are characteristically insightful, incisive, and entertaining. But I respectfully disagree. 

Case in point: Les Freres Corbusier’s Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson at the Public. The piece has gotten virtually uniform rave reviews from the highbrow and lowbrow crowds alike, as the Freres continue to do what they do best: experimental performance with a sense of humility, humor, and fun. And BB/AJ is perhaps the most successful to date, a beautiful blend of intelligence and raucousness. 

 Naturally, the piece is an emo-rock musical exploring the struggles of our seventh president, from youthful remembrances of Native American ambushes to the stealing of the election that put John Q. Adams in office, despite the fact that Jackson won the popular vote (sound familiar…?). The cast is amazing, the music by Michael Friedman is unnervingly dead-on, and the design—set by Donyale Werle and lighting by Justin Townsend—put the audience in a cabaret atmosphere where the pioneering West meets Limelight (my personal favorite touch: mounted moose heads asphyxiated by clear trash bags). In other words it’s what the grittiness of the supposedly “hip” pieces on Broadway—Next to Normal, Spring Awakening, and the ill-advised American Idiot—want to be. But they’re not. Sorry, Mr. Mayer.

The most notable aspect of BB/AJ is how it hearkens back to the lost art of political burlesques, which flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries. Every character, including Jackson is caricatured to be mythical, absurd, and pitiful, thanks to Alex Timbers’s text and direction. My one complaint, and it is a small one, is that the burlesque is a bit uneven: the least successful parodies are the ones that gesture directly to George W. Bush—that Jackson is a “uniter,” a xenophobe, a powermonger for “democracy,” a cowboy. Not that I have a problem with mocking our former prez. But alone it seems unfair, and eerily outdated. 

What would make the piece work better is acknowledging that Jackson has just as much in common with our current commander-in-chief: a superhero in touch with the everyman, a symbol of brute force and a “new day,” with a huge dose of the “Yes we can” attitude. If anything, the piece is an amazing send-up of the U.S. political system at large, and limiting it to the easy target that was Bush cheapens the broader, incredibly significant implications.

But BB/AJ remains one of the most brilliant and entertaining pieces I’ve seen to date.

someone please check the weather in hell

I agree with Ben Brantley.

the mind-body connection, vol. 1: stuffed & unstrung

Tweedster’s Note: Let’s face it, friends: there’s no such thing as journalistic objectivity. It’s common to refer to the “fair and balanced” or “fit to print” notion as nothing more than an ideological construct. Despite that, yours truly often feels constrained at times even here, in the bastion of free performance-speech. Sometimes, dear readers, you just have to spill your guts. So, in that spirit, OJ proudly presents the first in a series of entries entitled “The Mind-Body Connection,” a romp through the dissociative world of performance criticism. The Mind Review is what you’ve come to expect from us—thoughtful, informed inquiries into the epistemologies of performance (plus, we need to feel that six years of grad school wasn’t a total waste); The Body Review is the gut, visceral, perhaps inappropriate reaction of delight and/or horror. And what better performance to begin with than Henson Alternative’s Stuffed and Unstrung at the Union Square Theatre. 

 
 

The Body:

Holy shit! I’m in the same room as Brian Henson … this is probably the closest I will ever get to a religious revelation.

If you grew up as I did, you’ve retained a vast appreciation for the Muppets (even though these, as the company jokes, are not the M-words). You still laugh out loud at The Muppet Show and still need a nightlight after watching The Dark Crystal. (On a visit to Ostrich Land, recently, I could not stop yammering about how emus are creepy because they look like Skekses.) Nothing is more pure and joyous than the gaping maw of a Muppet in revelatory bliss. Not even the laughter of children.

For you, Stuffed and Unstrung is a childhood wet dream. Wait … bad metaphor. Oh well.

Thankfully, it is nothing like Avenue Q (although the easy comparison has been bandied about too much anyway). It’s more akin to Who’s Line Is It Anyway and Viola Spolin games, only much more complicated.

The coolest conceit of the piece is that, thanks to a camera set up down center and two screens above the stage, not only do you watch the performers live with the puppets, but you also get to see how it translates to the puppet-only performances you know and love. Dangerously, then, the comedy is cool, but the technical and choreographic elements upstage the main idea in a very cool way. Add to that the re-performance of two early Jim Henson films (“Java” is particularly exciting), and Stuffed and Unstrung plays more like a DVD’s special features that are more exciting (perhaps to the hardcore fan) than the film itself.

The improv is the piece’s boon and bane, as improv tends to be in form: some moments are pee-your-pants funny, others don’t quite land. Some of the jokes that don’t land are then turned around and made funny again. But all in all, fun fun fun fun.

I am in the presence of Muppets! MUPPETS!!! It’s a dream come … did that boar just shit a churro?...

The Mind:

Strange to say, but Stuffed and Unstrung is a fascinating case study in media culture and performance. Perhaps not staged with a deconstructive eye, the conflict between the live performance happening onstage and the mediated, filtered experience of the puppets alone on screen are a reminder of Auslander’s mis-grounded warning in Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, that concert-goers of today tend to focus more on the Jumbotron than they do on the performance they paid good money to see “live.” Although the screens are about the enhancement of the live experience, much as they are in rock concerts, these screens have the added bonus of creating a dialectic between puppeteer and technical performers.

Three particular moments come to mind that made this great tension feel palpable. The first is when an audience member is picked to join a scene, and onstage, the bumbling, almost slapstick attempts by the unassuming performer are hysterical and desperate; contrast this with the screen, where the puppet appears lifeless, lost, and, frankly, pathetic compared to the professionals. Second is one scene which involves their new “digital puppetry” setup, where a CGI “puppet” interacts with the live performers on the shared space of the screen. Onstage however, puppeteer Tyler Bunch looks more like he’s about to enter the world of the Lawnmower Man than toy about in typical Henson shenanigans. Finally, and most tellingly, the audience is invited to Tweet at the show during intermission, which subsequently appear on the screens in a glorified screensaver. It is their moment to be on stage, on the screen, much like the virtuoso performers. Messages were cheered for when recognized, and conversations were even started among disparate sections of the audience.

It’s not a stretch to compare the puppeteers to the Twitterers, though: in an hyperreal age of instant communications and overnight celebrities, our ability to perform “extensions” of ourselves online, give voice to disembodied form, is a type of puppetry in the digital age. But it also points to the mind-blowing commercial culture of becoming puppeteers: common Tweets read “This is hilarious!” “U should come see this now!” and, naturally, “ROTFL.” The line between pupeteering and marketing, it seems, has been blurred almost entirely.

school for coney island scandal

Playwright Derek Ahonen seems to be returning to the 1950s. His newest play with the Amoralists, Happy in the Poorhouse, is a compelling mixture of A View from the Bridge and The Honeymooners.

Set in Coney Island, the plot centers around the marriage of Paulie, a never-quite-made-it cage fighter, and Mary. Though the two love each other, the union has yet to be consummated. Paulie just can’t get it up for his childhood friend turned bride. The opening ten minutes centers around Mary’s randiness and Paulie’s evasion exclusively, as they prepare a welcome home party for their friend, and Mary’s ex-husband, Petie, who is returning from fighting in the Middle East. Add some mobsters, underage sexual encounters, a family man loan shark, and a staple gun, and you’ve got a hilarious farce on your hands (deftly performed by a large cast of eleven).

 

After the Amoralists last show, The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side, I went in to Poorhouse with perhaps unfairly high expectations. The company of actors is solid, Ahonen has proven himself one of the more talented contemporary playwrights, and the staging is fun and relentless. Poorhouse is definitely more spoofy and satirical than Pied Pipers, which makes for some fun revelations, hiding of characters, and fistfights. There are moments where I felt overwhelmed by the form: a couple of interactions that were way too sitcommy for my taste, a couple of plot devices in the forms of characters or relationships that felt more like devices, and a button that is entirely unresolved and confusing. Ahonen doesn’t need these crutches, in other words, and perhaps is still finding his voice as he molts his education of the well-made play.

Still, the Amoralists remain perhaps the only true-blue theatre company to see these days, and Happy in the Poorhouse is fun fun fun.

are you there god? it's me, tweed.

I have a confession to make: I have never been a teenage girl. Shocking, I know.

And despite the factory of entertainment industry products on the subject, from My So-Called Life to Welcome to the Dollhouse, even those awful sex-ed videos from middle school, I still feel like I have no handle or potential to empathize with the condition. Half of this is because it’s a place I will never find myself in, half is because the message communicated to me is that I can’t possibly understand. And I’m not trying to express this in a stand-up comedy, misogynisticky way: I simply remain utterly confused by teenage girldom, probably more from culture than actual human interaction and investigation.

That being said, I’ve looked into Phoebe Gloeckner’s incredibly popular graphic novels, Diary of a Teenage Girl. The adaptation I am about to see is of Minnie, an allegedly fictional account of growing up in 60s-hungover 1970s San Francisco. The story is heartbreaking and intense, to the point where the melodrama of all events in the teenage girl’s life is transposed into stark black-and-white action.

Marielle Heller (who also plays the lead role) has adapted the graphic novel into a new play at 3LD Arts Center: no small feat considering the spatial and temporal breadth of the original story. She condenses the story to the complications of protagonist Minnie and her relationship that forms with her mother’s boyfriend, Monroe. Sexual awakening and falls from innocence ensue to an almost absurd degree, as Minnie gets mixed up with heroin addicts and seedy rapists. The performances of the cast are uniformly strong and delightful, and I’d be remiss not to give a shout-out to Michael Laurence, who plays the burnt-out and lost Monroe with the utmost sincerity; we almost forgive him for his shortsightedness and Humbert Humbert desire.

Rachel Eckerling’s and Sarah Cameron Sunde’s direction has all the fun and freneticism of the 16-year-old worldview, and the video design by C. Andrew Bauer that covers the walls of the space in 360 degrees is awesome. Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of the production is the space itself—it’s huge. Staged in the round, the intimacy and scatteredness of the action get swallowed up. Mocked up to have the feel of a 70s living room, I wished that the playing space were at least half the size it is. I simply didn’t feel at home and, by extension, implicated in the action and sympathetic to the situation. Perhaps because of the form of the graphic novel adaptation, I was hoping for something more otherworldly and dark. But the characters gallivant around the audience more like the cast of Three’s Company.

Nevertheless, Diary of a Teenage Girl is a wonderful experiment in the cross-pollination of an increasingly accepted art form into performance. Instead of falling into the campy zeitgeist of This Film or That Show: the Musical!, the production deals in genuine experience and incredibly difficult issues. I remain totally mystified.

total recall

Sometimes I wonder if, in the coming years, a new Martin Esslin will come along, a guide to let us know of some type of neo-Theatre of the Absurd, but not, a form ushered into the U.S. post-9/11. Albeit more political, less syntactical, there is a trend of quiet ennui, detachment from the world around us that’s strongly influenced by not only the Absurd but also 60s underground cinema and the explosion of pop culture. Meditations by groups such as Temporary Distortion, Richard Maxwell’s NYC Players and, of course, WaxFactory would be a part of this eerie, nuanced aesthetic.

And WaxFactory’s Delirium 27 at Abron Arts was a fascinating experiment in aestheticized individualism and memory, even if it doesn’t always come together. Centering around Mr. Black (Eric Dean Scott), the piece sets him in an undisclosed location, being interrogated by two mysterious detectives (which are played with amazing presence by Primoz Bezjak and Miha Klemencic). As they dance the dance of film noir of obstinacy and double talk concerning the murder of a woman (Gillian Chadsey), the performance cuts back and forth between a useless present, interpretation of the past, and memories in all their glory—fuzzy, idealized, incomplete, projected.

 

The technological accompaniments to the play on memory—live, washed out video feeds, wonderful music and warped sound, and an almost constant, amplified humming of fluorescent lights—are quite lovely. But the screens become pedantic when they flash quotations and factoids, such as the lack of scientific evidence for a “photographic memory.” The words are blurred and they slides are displayed with virtually no time to read them. Perhaps it’s meant to correlate with perception, the inadequacy of committing experience to memory, but in its actualized form it’s either intrusive or downright annoying.

What’s most frustrating is that the strong moments are incredibly so. Director and writer Erika Latta knows how to stage her actors, and many of the images are quite entrancing in their control, fluidity, punctuated by slapstick chaos. The technical design is evocative, but the haphazardness of the text and stilted architecture of physical and technical elements of the stage (the piece is billed as a “performance-installation,” despite its traditional proscenium staging) prevent the whole from getting off the ground.

I hope WaxFactory continues their investigation into memory and aesthetics—they’re working with a lot of good stuff but performance, like memory, is not an autonomous form: the pathways and circuitry are almost impossibly complicated, intricate, and ephemeral.