Risk-taking Seattle theaters offer wild surprises
I’m sitting in a room furnished like a shabby office. the workers at their desks are bored, lonely, fretful. one chats with his close friend, a forlorn plant. Another voices her romantic longings through puppets made out of office supplies. A third stuffs and slathers herself with toxic-green birthday cake.
I’m describing a show: Pony World Theatre’s “Suffering, Inc.,” which (regrettably) ended its run at Washington Hall a few weeks ago.
And it was one of the most unexpected, inventive and deranged pieces of theater I’ve encountered this season.
Deranged, in this case, is a good thing. And I’m hoping for more vital, creative derangement on the horizon.
Seattle theaters have stage classics generally covered, and also mount a steady stream of modern scripts in which characters are well-defined, and behave within a realistic context. Plays with a cogent narrative of exposition, conflict, resolution.
But one of the things theater can do is explore how many different ways (an infinite number) there are to tell a story. And redefine what a story is.
The more potent new works that tilt the kaleidoscope, knock you off center, and disorient you rewardingly, the better for our theatrical landscape.
As playwright Eugene Ionesco put it, “A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.” And theatrical art needs to upset and override expectations sometimes. how else to keep renewing itself — and surprising us?
Of course, there are rules of the road for this sort of trip. Such work demands abundant creativity, performance skill, discipline and that elusive thing called talent to pave the way — and keep pretentiousness and turgidity at bay.
Risks rewarded
“Suffering, Inc.” was a happy surprise in several respects. the script (created by director Brendan Healy and his Pony World company) was spliced together from Anton Chekhov plays.
A potentially dreadful idea, this gambit succeeded because the artists found fertile, common ground between Chekhov’s early-1900s Russian characters and 21st-century office drones: angst, ennui and desperately comic pathos, conveyed in this instance with eccentric brio.
Familiar objects became talismans: A creepy boss barked orders through a bullhorn. Pounding staplers and slamming drawers coalesced into a fidgety symphony.
The latest Café Nordo food-theater event, “To Savor Tomorrow,” also gazed forward and back in a similarly playful, offbeat way.
In this zany Cold War-era romp, the Nordo troupe once again blended culinary savvy, pop culture and haute cuisine spoofery, and eco-awareness into their whimsical foodie cabaret.
The audience gets fed and entertained but also briefed on such heady concerns as (during the mock airline flight in “To Savor Tomorrow”) the impact of high-yield agriculture on the global ecology, and U.S. foreign policy.
The edibles, potables and framing devices of Nordo shows are, so far, superior to the scripts and stagecraft served along with them.
But the company’s ingenuity, and passion for greening the Earth one bite and dance number at a time, whets the appetite for more.
The one-person show, which has already been reshaped and twisted and turned every which way by countless purveyors, can also rejuvenate with an injection of fresh inspiration.
Take the remarkable solo work “My Mind is Like an Open Meadow,” at the City Arts Festival last month.
Creator-performer Erin Leddy, of Portland’s resourceful Hand2Mouth troupe, spent a year taping the reflections and reminiscences of her grandmother, not long before the latter’s death.
Her solo piece weaves in many witty, philosophical, poignant comments from her elder. but what could have been simply a sentimental valentine to a beloved matriarch turned into a haunting dual portrait.
With swift changes of wigs and garments, interjections of music, dance and poetry, the multitalented Leddy entwined her grandmother’s confusions, regrets and (hard-won) pearls of wisdom with her own fears of mortality and loss.
As “Open Meadow” grew more enigmatic and volatile, it shifted from comforting terrain to the tangled, insoluble mysteries of being alive, old, young, female. Images from it stayed with me for days
Certainly, experimentation, be it in a theater or a science lab, is bound to fail more often than not. When it yields results, it’s exhilarating. When it goes kaput, maybe there’s something to be gleaned from the failure — for the artist, if not always the audience.
We can be grateful for local theater spaces that provide a steady forum for Seattle’s original, offbeat theatrics — Washington Ensemble Theatre (WET), Annex Theatre, on the Boards, new City, et al.
But as Bob Dylan noted, “To live outside the law you must be honest.” And for a theater explorer, being brutally honest often means being willing to sculpt, focus and ruthlessly edit one’s work, no matter how unconventional it is.
Risks unfulfilled
The new “Mormon Bird Play,” debuted by WET this fall, used a challenging nonlinear format to harshly critique Mormon religious doctrine.
Writer-director Roger Benington illustrated (and reiterated) his view of Mormonism as a homophobic, patriarchal institution with a Christ parable, a campy re-enactment of Mormon pioneer days, a rape, a bird fantasia, and a lot of juvenile bullying.
The effect was a piling on of theatrical ideas, a jumble in need of more discrimination and clarity. It created a lot of heat, but little illumination.
Like “Mormon Bird Play,” the recent Annex show “c. 1993 (you never step in the same river twice)” also seemed overstuffed and undercooked. this piece had an intriguing premise, that engaged intermittently in riffs and starts.
Collaboratively concocted by the actors and director Bret Fetzer, “c. 1993″ aimed to expose cultural values and contradictions by juxtaposing images of actor River Phoenix, who died young of a drug overdose, with the feminist stance and songs of grunge-rock diva Courtney Love.
The piece was a mishmash of vivid music, film re-enactments and half-baked skits that were variations on the theme.
The central thesis of “c. 1993″ — that our culture romanticizes the deaths of the sensitive celebrity man-child, but demonizes tough female survivor artists — is intriguing, and may yet beget a more focused, less indulgent ensemble piece.
Of course, theater patrons who step out of their comfort zones always run the risk of being bored to tears. or irritated enough to want to scream “Make it stop!” at the stage.
But any kind of ponderous, misconceived stage or screen effort, mainstream or outre, can trigger that reaction. so why not risk the path less traveled on occasion?
Arguably, boundary-pushing theater makers need more time, talent and artistic rigor to impart new stories in fresh and stimulating ways. the bigger their investment, the more we’ll want to follow where they lead.
Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com
This article was corrected on Dec. 4, 2011. An earlier version misplaced Anton Chekhov’s characters in history. Chekhov’s plays were set in the late 1800s/early 1900s.
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