Review
Osseus
Robert
Cohen
in Los Angeles
Charles Mee’s A Perfect Wedding, which opened the new
Kirk Douglas Theatre in west Los Angeles (Culver City to be
precise), ends with a wedding buffet, and that’s pretty
much what dramatist Mee has given us too. The play, with twenty
actors and forty costumes, is an attractive and tasty smorgasbord
of delights – and a few sour grapes - that celebrates
the enticements and perils of married love.
Based vaguely on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the play opens
to preparations for a young couple’s beach wedding on
Martha’s Vinyard and the piecemeal gathering of the couple’s
various parents, sisters, brothers and assorted lovers; this
all turns sharply inland when the groom arrives and, after a
few awkward exchanges, heads brusquely off for a walk in “the
forest.” The guests run off to find him, but instead find
each other – and themselves, we are led to understand.
Adding to the woodsy humus are four gay wedding planners (one
wears a “Homo Depot” t-shirt), a sex-fantasizing
but celibate priest, and a lively pair of philosophical gravediggers
– on loan, apparently, from one of Shakespeare’s
other plays.
The
play was developed in collaboration between Mee, dramaturg Pier
Carlo Talenti, and a large number of “workshop participants”
– none of whom landed in the cast – and the play
(or pastiche) clearly bears (or betrays) such origins: both
its strength and weakness lies its vigorous improvisational
élan and in its seemingly-effortless segues from family
drama to witty parody to soap opera to musical comedy to Platonic
solecisms to sheer silliness - before coming to a close with
something resembling the Mamamouchi ceremony from Molière’s
Bourgeois Gentleman.
The
plus side of Mee’s circus is that each of the twenty talented
actors have the center ring all to themselves, at least for
a speech or two. The negative side is that the dramaturgy develops
no momentum whatever, and the intellectual content – scintillating
at first – soon runs out of steam as Mee cascades down
to boilerplate dramatic bromides in Act Two: namely the tiresome
tradeoffs of marital commitment (security versus adventure)
and the importance of connecting with the “other”
(as defined by sex, ethnicity, religion, ideology, or “whatever”).
Having mined these in Act One, Mee runs out of things to say
after the intermission, and reaches a coda mainly through an
entire-cast-costume-change (quite spectacular, to be sure),
and lively dancing beneath multi-colored falling leaves. It’s
a perfect wedding, perhaps, but a little bit more for its participants
than its spectators.
The
Douglas Theatre is certainly propitious; it’s the first
“off-Broadway” satellite of the city’s premiere
Mark Taper Forum, and Mee’s play is directed – quite
energetically and imaginatively - by Gordon Davidson, the founding
director of the Taper, now retiring at the end of this, his
37th year. Davidson gets superb support in the intensely colorful
costumes by Christal Weatherly and imaginative scenic design
– sliding curtains pulled around by the cast to represent
various places on the beach and in the forest - by Donna Marquet.
Of the actors, Leo Marks was a standout as a deserted lover
and Veralyn Jones as the mother of a deserted groom, but the
entire cast was a delight.
In medical dictionaries, osseus labyrint refers to a cavity
in the petrous portion of the inner ear’s temporal bone.
(What? Did you not know that?) Capitalized, however, it is the
name of a duo of slender and very attractive performance artists
in their early forties that have been enchanting audiences around
the world for the past fifteen years, mainly by hanging naked
by their heels and gyrating – solo and in concert –
in ever-surprising configurations. Hannah Sim and Mark Steger
are the naked artists, and for their current show called Modern
Prometheus LLC, they have commandeered a stunning, fully-dressed
collaborator in the electro-mechanical installation artist/performer
Barry Schwartz (a.k.a. Dr. Pank), together with an ample sound
studio in Marina del Rey, an adventurous producer in UCLAlive,
and a host of benefactors including the well-stocked Rockefeller
Foundation. All have conspired to bring us an altogether zapping
experience.
According to the press release, Modern Prometheus “depicts
the corporate launch of a new life form, Human Analogues, built
in a laboratory from the atom up”; it also alerts us that
“individuals with pacemakers are advised not to attend.”
Forewarned is forearmed, I guess: We are led into Mr. Schwartz’
installation by a team of white-robed “processors”
who take our DNA samples, make us sign a health release, and
usher us into something resembling the bowels of Hoover Dam’s
hydroelectric generator converted into Dr. Frankenstein’s
laboratory. Other processors – some in black this time,
walking as though they were on slow-motion bicycles –
fire up electronic gizmos and monitor rapidly-changing electronic
dials and plasma screens all but bursting with multiplying images.
Dripping water and unearthly growls haunt and surround us, as
Analogue XX and Analogue XY (Ms. Sim and Mr. Steger) are brought
in, shrink-wrapped in several layers of clear plastic, and completely
shaven from head to pudendum to toe. With bodies rigid and their
eyes closed, the two Analogues are unwrapped, carried as stiffs
to the edge of a parabolic dynamo, then hoisted aloft by their
ankles. Then they slowly begin to twitch. And so do we.
As
life swells up in them, the Analogues are lowered to the floor,
lain prone, jolted by electrical shocks (high voltage but low
amperage, the artists claim, presumably facetiously - but you
never know), spread-eagled in extremis, rehung in the air by
chinstrap apparati, light-painted with jittery video projections,
and continuously peered at, poked, positioned, and prodded by
the black and white garbed processors. Never have two people
appeared so utterly naked – so many bare forked animals
- and yet, oddly, so invulnerable. Sim and Steger have developed
a repertoire of exquisite, butoh-derived contortions that articulate
every vertabra, finger-bone and synovial joint in their skeletons;
the virtuosity of their performance allows them to dominate
what in other contexts would be nothing but humiliation. Osseus
Labyrint is truly a “labyrinth of bones,” provoking
recurrent images of birth and death, holocaust and creation,
Prometheus (Schwartz) and Adam and Eve. It was also probably
the first time the insertion and subsequent expulsion of a bright
chrome pessary became the climax of a public performance, at
least in my theatergoing experience.
But does it work? Not entirely. Theatrical experiences capitalizing
mainly on novelty can quickly consume their capital, and Modern
Prometheus LLC ran out of its electro-mechanical energy long
before its limp, poorly-thought-out ending. Nor could the facetious
self-explanations in the program – and spouted out by
a disembodied head (Schwartz’s) on two video monitors
– help keep things moving along after the first hour.
Given a compelling dramatic structure, however, or by cutting
the work down to the length of, say, Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony, osseus labyrinth would have a magnificent piece.
Both Indian and Indian-esque theatre pieces, each remarkable,
were in Los Angeles this Fall, exhibiting both sides of the
theatre’s multicultural dilemma. Gods, Goddesses and Ancestors,
a program of masked rituals from the Indian state of Kerala,
was presented on the UCLA campus by UCLAlive, an extraordinary
presenter of important theatre pieces (they also brought us
osseus labyrint). This was very much the real thing: geniune
ancient Theyyam rituals brought from Kerala to UCLA’s
Royce Hall, in which exclusively male performers, according
to program notes, “after extensive mental, physical and
spiritual preparations ‘become’ deities representing
both male and female gods.” The Theyyam costumes and headdresses,
made by the performers “from natural materials like leaves
and bark,” are spectacular; wildly colored headdresses
tower above the performers like rigid parachutes, and the resulting
dance, to the continuously whining shawms and pulsating drums,
are infectious and compelling as the performance builds in increasing
rhythms to, according to the program, its “exact point
of fusion, the defining moment that is known as mukhardarshanam,
when the a mortal becomes a god and loses all sense of personal
identity.” But defining to whom? The Theyyam ritual is
thrilling spectacle, to be sure, but its meaning (which is the
whole point of definition), and its climactic “point of
fusion,” is perceived only by the initiate, not the spectator,
who can only understand the goings-on through program notes
(which is why this observer must rely on same in presenting
this report). Hence the crowd in UCLA’s cavernous Royce
Hall, quite rapt at the outset, began leaving in distressing
numbers well before the half-way point. No matter how spectacular,
without some personal engagement – even vicarious engagement
– in the rite’s sacred meaning, we were left merely
gawking at Kerala’s divine and ancient splendors, and
feeling embarrassed for performers asked to become divine merely
– at least on the Royce Hall stage - for our entertainment.
As
Vishnu Dreams had problems on the other side of the intercultural
equation. A much lauded show (with a Critics’ Choice nod
from the L.A. Times), this modern adaptation by Shishir Kurup
of the Indian classic Ramayana proved an ambitious, often infectious,
but ultimately disappointing work in its world premiere at East
West Players. Kurup, who was born in Bombay, raised in Kenya,
and now lives in California, describes himself as a “skeptical
believer,” explaining that the Shiva Temple of his childhood
was, “rather than a place of austere worship, a place
of creative play.” And play – often inspired - is
certainly what Kurup gives us: epic characters in an updated
setting, shadow puppets and a modern press conference, dramatic
language ranging from pseudo-archaic (“miscreant wife-robbers!”)
to modern slang (“Cushy!”), silly puns (“preference
of reference”), and audience-tickling current literary
allusions (“This lightness of being? Unbearable!”).
Vishnu certainly has the strong dramaturgical structure that
the Theyyam lacks, and its often-clever updating has the potential
to bring us more fully into its original Hindu vision, but the
play’s continual reliance on self-parody prevents a deeper
absorption in its story, characters, or themes – Eastern
or Western, classic or modern. Myself, I would have preferred
Kurup write either as skeptic or believer; but not as both.
Sean T. Krishnan as the evil Ravana was the standout of an uneven
cast; the very fine puppets were by Lynn Jeffries.
