by Jeff Grygny

The agony of frustrated love isn’t as popular a theme of art these days as it was in the 19th Century, but it’s probably still a thing. Love—and losing it—gnaws at the heart of The Tales of Hoffmann, now playing in a newly translated, nipped, and tucked interpretation by Skylight Music Theatre working in collaboration with the ever-game Milwaukee Opera Theatre. But this weird opera, based on the even weirder stories of E. T. A. Hoffman, takes love as the starting point for journeys into a twilight world where science and magic dance with specters from the subconscious mind of the early modern age.

Hoffman’s proto-surrealistic imagery of eyeballs, mirrors, doubles, mechanical girls, and dark sorcerers has been analyzed down to the atomic level by such theorists as the post-Freudian semiotician Jaques Lacan, to rattle the foundations of our commonsense notions of self and reality. You won’t sense much of that bottomless abyss in this production— but director Jill Anna Ponasik and her creative team have embraced the weirdness to create a wild ride that does everything short of throwing Mardi Gras beads around your neck to show you a good time. While there’s much to please opera lovers here, it also succeeds in not making non-fans want to run for the exits. It’s an opera with the over-the-top theatrics of a rock concert, and a party vibe that Lady Gaga would love.

The show is a total theatrical work: words, music, acting, costumes, scenery and lighting all contributing to the stylish spectacle. Librettist Michael Carré has trimmed the show from three hours to two with two fifteen-minute intermissions; the framing story has been abridged, and long recitatives condensed to spoken dialog. The English translation is accessible and for the most part very understandable as sung. And they tacked on a happier ending. Music director Kerry Bieneman has moved the heavens to condense the score from full orchestra to a very interesting and satisfying two pianos, a harp, and a multi-percussionist, which, combined with the wonderful voices of the dozen or so singers, creates a rich, full sound that, except for the harp, which sometimes seems overpowered, never leaves you wanting more. A top-hatted Michael “Ding” Lorenz roves over a platform above the stage playing everything from kettledrums to noisemakers, creating moods from dreamy to nightmarish; his vibraphone is particularly haunting.

This is opera, so the plot makes little sense, and the characters are one-dimensional. Why are the evil magicians intent on wrecking Hoffman’s love life? Who knows? Story and character are servants to the nonlinear logic of music. Maybe that’s why Lisa Anne Schlenker’s impressive set design, spectacularly illuminated by Jason Fassl, incorporates a stage-spanning piano harp and a giant cello scroll, while movable set pieces kluge musical instruments with steampunk machines. Sonya Berlovitz’s costumes are a feast for the eyes, and sometimes further the story, as when glittery masks stand for the mirror into which Hoffman loses his soul.

Ponasik makes one particularly  interesting choice: to replace the “dark father “bass-baritone villains with the same sopranos who played Hoffman’s erstwhile lovers in other acts. This brings a whiff of #metoo to the proceedings, without getting too picky about the details. It also makes for a fabulous trio in one of the most uncanny scenes, when the sorcerer Dapertutto summons the ghost of Antonia’s mother in order to get her to sing (which, as she is consumptive, will kill her). In a nifty bit of stage magic, the ghost appears to be inside an upright piano, though how exactly they accomplished this is a mystery. Might this gender-swap have altered the story’s Freudian calculus, making possible the happy ending where Hofffman’s faithful muse (his feminine psyche?) persuades him to channel his grief into creativity?  Hurrah!

From Jean Broekhuizen’s goof on divas in her humorous introduction song, it’s clear that these skilled artists aren’t taking themselves too seriously. As befits an opéra-comique,the acting  is often broad and cartoonish. Choreographer James Zager, who has worked with MOT before, does a marvelous job getting the singers to perform with their entire bodies, eliciting quirky and energetic character movements, like Cecilia Davis’ doll-like stiffness, and Brett Sweeney’s star turn as a frisky servant that is a little comic gem. This is as much movement theater as it is opera, tastily combining 19th-century melodrama, Spongebob Squarepants, and the Marx Brothers.

John Kaneklides plays the hapless poet Hoffmann like any angsty hipster artist with odd hair. The acts mostly conclude with him collapsing on the floor in Romantic despair (as one does). He rather creepily falls in love with Davis’s Olympia while she is apparently unconscious, then pursues her despite it being obvious to all that she’s a wind-up robot. Ah, love. Davis also wins the “best evil laugh” prize in a second role as the wicked Doctor Miracle; a sinister shaman out of a Neal Gaiman story. While Ariana Douglas, with crepe hair eyebrows as the “eyeball-maker” Coppelius, comes off as a bit like a kid in a Halloween costume, she utterly rules with subtlety and charm in the role of the courtesan Giulietta, showing how, with vulnerability and ambiguity, a woman can lead a man to unwise actions.

Though a light, fun entertainment, The Tales of Hoffmann exhibits unexpected depths. Not only does this production re-tune the dusty  classic for contemporary tastes, it has great fun doing it. Brava!

Skylight Music Theatre
in association with Milwaukee Opera Theatre
presents
The Tales of Hoffmann
composed by Jacques Offenbach

Playing through March 29
at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Cabot Theatre

http://www.skylightmusictheatre.org/shows-events/on-stage/tales-of-hoffmann

“Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.”

Mephistopheles

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. “

Theodor Adorno

by Jeff Grygny

Christopher Marlowe was aiming to create a blockbuster when he adapted the German legend of Faust for the Elizabethan stage. He brought classical allusions for the educated set, dirty jokes and slapstick for the masses, and the horripilating thrill of demonology, slathered in poetry and plenteous piety to appease the skittish churchmen. The play has been produced in countless ways (a Milwaukee Rep production decades ago was based for some reason on Eskimo imagery). But no one to my knowledge has set it in Nazi Germany, inspired by Thomas Mann’s novel of the era and Visconti’s famous film of fascist society The Damned. No one, that is, but Off the Wall Theatre’s Dale Gutzman, Milwaukee’s homegrown master bricoleur. On his shoebox stage, with a cast of dedicated volunteers, Gutzman creates a pocket cosmos, with its own internal grammar and a vocabulary of actions, music, and images. Imagine what he’d do with the resources of, say, the Rep. And yet his independence frees him to offer fare that would never make it to the mainstream stage in this city. In his hands The Tragic History of Doctor Faustus becomes an edgy, transgressive freak show; as potent as absinthe on the rocks with a psychedelic mushroom garnish.

It’s strange that nobody else has set the play as a fascist fable, since it works uncannily well; Faustus’ assistant is even named Wagner! The show stays true to Marlowe’s text,  but origamis it with interpolated  scenes and characters into an intense exploration of fascism as a spiritual puzzle: how could educated, cultured people come to support the vulgarity, superstition and industrialized horror of the holocaust?  Hitler’s rise becomes the backdrop to Faustus’s story, told by cleverly referencing our common knowledge of history. Faustus, as played by Jeremy Welter, is a mousy academic who isn’t satisfied with legitimate knowledge. His ambition to become superhuman leads him to meet with a pair of sleazy magicians who—like Nazi recruiters—are ever so solicitous while appealing to his fantasies.

The play proceeds in a succession of images, surreal, sexy and grotesque, often all at once. Faustus’ assistant, played as a brutal skinhead by Max Williamson, sexually bullies a young boy, who later dons the swastika armband and gets Hitler’s autograph in his own personal copy of Mein Kamph. Nathan Danzer plays a seductive devil as a cross-dressed femme fatale, quite overpowering his virtuous counterpart, played by Barbara Weber in white. Period songs, including  “Du, du liegst mir im Herzen” and “Falling in Love Again” embellish and comment ironically on the action, and of course there’s plenty of bombastic Wagner music. Even the ensemble contributes to a dreamlike mood, moving slowly and deliberately as if in a ritual: under totalitarian rule, they must be most scrupulous in everything they say and do.

And just as rational people wonder what can be the appeal of that nonsense, we wonder how Faustus can fall into so transparent a trap. James Strange’s Mephistopheles captures the tortured soul of the fallen angel; Mohammed N. Elbsat as a friendly rabbi tries in vain to dissuade Faustus from his diabolical purpose, but is captured and meets a predictably grisly end. When Lucifer and Beelzebub appear as affable businessmen, they offer Faustus a vision of the Seven Deadly sins as a parade of concentration camp inmates, and supernatural intrusions are delivered in the cheesy style of a neighborhood haunted house. Faustus’ magical escapades are embarrassingly childish— whether slamming a pie in the face of the bucktoothed Pope or performing cheap parlor magic for the Fürer. Helen of Troy, pimped by Mephistopheles, doesn’t even try to conceal her contempt for him. You could say that Faustus was damned by toxic masculinity: the perverse will to power. At the end of the play Marlowe collides with Becket, as Welter’s final speech is delivered in voiceover, while he, nearly catatonic, is dressed as a ludicrous Hitler/clown. It’s a shattering moment: damnation as paralysis.

In The Tragic History of Doctor Faustus, Dale Gutzman does what he can be relied upon to do: creating a shattered mirror of our own world.  It brilliantly embodies what drama theorist Herbert Blau called  “blooded thought:” an analysis that can’t be reduced to dry words alone.

In Marlowe’s time, devils were very real: they were said to have appeared on stage when the play was performed, driving men mad. Today we need no supernatural agents to do the job.

Off the Wall Theatre presents

The Tragic History of Doctor Faustus

by Christopher Marlowe

playing through March 18

Off the Wall Theatre

By Jeff Grygny

There’s a telling moment in the first scene of Equivocation, currently playing at Next Act Theater: Richard Burbage, the actor/manager of the King’s Men, the company that Shakespeare writes for, is pulling on his boots after a rehearsal of King Lear, a play which they mockingly describe as “an experimental work where the king runs around in his underwear.” Burbage give his boot a tug and a decisive “zip” sounds in the theater. That moment—no oversight, we can be sure— proclaims exactly where this show is coming from: though it’s set in the Sixteenth Century, it’s very much about today.

Nobody calls anyone “thou,” or “my lord;” there’s none of the elaborate ceremony of aristocracy that was part power display, and part religious ritual. Playwright Bill Cain isn’t interested in those things. He shows Shakespeare (or “Shagspeare,” as he’s called here, apparently a contemporary spelling) as what he manifestly was: a brilliant writer working for a prestigious and profitable theater company. If it was today, he’d be writing series for Netflix, and Mark Ulrich plays him as such, with an ironic manner and a nasal twang. He’s a professional—but first and foremost, he’s an artist.

Cain, who, as a founder of the Boston Shakespeare Company, is steeped in Shakespeare’s work and scholarship, attempts almost hubristically to reproduce in modern sensibility the genetic structure, let’s say, of a Shakespeare play. Cain creates a plot as complex as a Renaissance fencing diagram, with story lines that echo and mirror each other, supporting a webwork of themes all strung together with wordplay that dances in lapidary phrases, hinting at more than they say. It’s a rare play that makes you want to sit down and read the script so you can catch the implications of what everyone’s saying. Equivocation is like that. Heavy? A bit. So we can thank the gods of theater that Cain wraps his story around human passions that anyone can understand: a political/psychological thriller and family drama full of strong sympathetic characters and lifted up with generous helpings of comedy (often wryly directed at Shakespeare’s flaws as a playwright) and an uncanny relevance to current events.

If any director can pull off this Mount Everest of a play, with its sophisticated language and whiplash changes of tone, it’s Michael Cotey, who has proven himself adept both with serio-comedy and dramatic rhythm. Cotey leads his actors in a style that’s often quite farcical— which can sometimes feel like you’re looking at a cartoon composed of aphorisms, or a stained glass window with a few comic panes. The King’s Men come off as a Renaissance Rat Pack. Cotey, who staged this play at Northwestern University not long ago, throws in some wonderful bits of stagecraft, such as when manuscript pages shower down over “Shag” while he tosses off a script that will later be known as Macbeth; or giving us a graphic lesson in the exact meaning of “drawn and quartered.” When the players re-enact scenes from one of the plays, they do it in a vivid “you are there” style that uses sound and lighting effects to re-create the excitement that must have attended their first performances.

It’s even more impressive that the whole thing is performed by only six actors playing multiple roles, often switching characters mid-scene. David Cecsarini gives Ulrich a fine foil as Sir Robert Cecil, a king-maker, and master of intrigue who summons the writer to produce a piece of propaganda to immortalize the king’s triumph over the conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot. Cecil seems like a typical irritable administrator—until he starts torturing someone (and we begin to realize exactly what a Bill of Rights is for). Josh Krause is a hoot as King James, a literally entitled frat boy with a Scottish accent, while Eva Nimmer brings heart to her role as Shakespeare’s neglected daughter Judith,  acting as something of a chorus to share keen insights into her father’s work, and her own rather dim outlook on the theater and life in general. Jonathan Smoots is extraordinary as Father Henry Garnett, the Jesuit priest who was accused of inciting the Catholic-led plot against England’s Protestant king (the play also makes you want to run to Google and look up the history). Smoots is low-key, subtle, and seemingly unguarded: if anyone in the play understands life, it’s he (Cain is himself a Jesuit priest. Coincidence? Not likely). We see Garnett brilliantly defend himself in a trial scene, after which he reveals to Shakespeare the secret of equivocation: to respond, not to the question asked, but to the hidden question behind it.

If there’s anything missing in this frighteningly intelligent play, it’s the part of Shakespeare that’s rooted in the Renaissance. Brilliant as Cain’s language is, it’s literary in an abstract, modern sense, rather than sensually poetic. In Shakespeare’s world, everything was connected in a great chain of being where lions, heliotropes, topazes, and the sun all resonated with the same angelic frequency, as did all human virtues and weaknesses. To be modern is to not inhabit that cosmos—of which the Globe Theatre itself was but a microcosm. It must also be said that the characters show little variation in voice—unlike Shakespeare, who could evoke a whole life’s history in three lines.

But what Equivocation misses in lyricism, it makes up in the fierce light it shines on our times. It’s hard to hear of Cecil’s attempt to spin a phony narrative without thinking of this week’s headlines. You can see the current president in James’ narcissistic monarch; but even more so the damnable equivocations of the “war on terror” and “enhanced interrogation,” which likely helped inspire this play, which was first performed in 2009.

A play of ideas that’s also massively entertaining, Equivocation strips centuries of dust from Shakespeare, giving urgency to works that might seem like antiques to many people, while at the same time showing how a master artist can walk the razor’s edge between integrity and survival in perilous times. It’s a problem that many artists are struggling with these days. They could do worse than to see this show.

Next Act Theatre presents

Equivocation

By Bill Cain

Directed by Michael Cotey

playing through February 25

www.nextact.org 

by Jeff Grygny

What’s the worst thing that could happen to you? Triple that, quadruple that, and you have the predicament of Gregor Samsa, the unfortunate protagonist of Metamorphosis, which has just finished its run as a movement theater performance by Theatre Gigante. Samsa’s already miserable life gets much worse when he discovers that he’s inexplicably become a giant insect. Flawlessly cast and directed with style and a sound concept by Isabel Kralj, this interpretation of Franz Kafka’s story captures the original’s dark humor, existential dread, and heartbreaking sense of humanity and it’s limits.

According to Kralj, she fell in love with the story when she was a teen, and it’s not difficult to find an adolescent sensibility in Gregor, who lives with his parents and has, shall we say, body issues. His hapless, not-quite-innocent family is portrayed by Hannah Klapperich-Mueller, Ron Scott Fry, and Silena Milewski, all in pale makeup and black and white costumes, in a mannered acting style that makes them seem almost like marionettes, or characters in a grim Eastern European cartoon.  Nonetheless, each manages to show a kernel of humanity— as all great puppets do—particularly Milewski as Samsa’s long-suffering sister, who tends to him out of devotion until it all becomes too much. Klapperich-Mueller as their mother does wonders with a pretty undeveloped character. As Gregor, Edwin Olvera delivers a tour-de-force of modern dance. Beginning in a stylized black suit, he distills Samsa’s daily grind into a sequence of movements that accelerate to show a soulless existence, devoid of joy or intimacy. The transformed Olvera wears black trunks in lieu of a corny cockroach suit: his bare flesh presents an abject human being, with grotesque, contorted movements. Olvera’s years with the Pilobolus Dance Company, famous for being inspired by organic forms, could not have prepared him better for this role. It’s impressive how much Olvera communicates non-verbally, from awkwardness with his unwelcome new body to Samsa’s ever-shifting emotional states.

Samsa’s thoughts are voiced equally impressively by Ben Yela. With total imaginative commitment and not a trace of ironic detachment,  he creates another rich channel for expressing his character’s deteriorating psyche. As they sink deeper into inhumanity, Yela subtly adopts an insectoid voice and posture; it’s a brilliant performance from one of the city’s finest young actors. Meanwhile, Kralj’s stagecraft incorporates the strategic abuse of organic materials (apples and milk) to effectively create an appropriately  disgusting environment that’s not too disgusting. Alan Piotrowicz’s constructivist set and lighting further support the show’s aesthetic orientation, while the sound track, which Kralj selected from the work of Slovenian composer Borut Kržišnik, ranges from moody atmospheres to jazzy breaks to avant-garde noise.

The title Metamorphosis is borrowed from Ovid’s classical poem of Greek myth, telling how the gods punished or rewarded mortals by transforming them into various non-human forms. It depicted a world where god, human, and animal exist on a continuum of being in an organic cosmos. Kafka, writing in the age of machines, draws a radically different cosmos, where the laws of science rule in place of the gods, and human fate is governed by the implacable forces of capital. Yet for all its surrealism, Samsa’s predicament is strangely moving for anyone who has had a debilitating injury, or has had to care for an ailing relative, or even had to put down a pet. With clarity and honesty, Metamorphosis gives a knowing nod to all those who can no longer provide value in a transactional world.

Contrary to popular belief, Kafka actually had friends and pastimes, and he apparently participated in the cultural life of his native Bohemia. Yet, like Samsa, he caved in to family pressure, laboring unhappily for years as an insurance salesman; his writings were never published during his short life. With their peculiar blend of dark comedy and surrealism, they have earned him his own personal adjective, and Metamorphosis virtually created the sub-genre that became known as “body horror.” But unlike later practitioners, Kafka brought a sense of the absurd and genuine human feeling to his isolated antiheroes. If the idea of “following your bliss” had been current at the time, Metamorphosis might never have been written—but we would have lost a classic of high modernist alienation.

Theatre Gigante presents

Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka

Adapted and Directed by Isabelle Kralj

Music by Borut Kržišnik

January 25 through 28, 2018

“Know thyself,”
The Temple of Apollo at Delphi

by Jeff Grygny

Nobody knows what the first production of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex looked like in Third Century BCE Athens, when theater attendance was required by law. But people love to speculate. We know from textual and archeological evidence that the actors wore masks, and that there was rhythmic singing and dance involved, but that’s about it. In a remarkable production of this 2300 year old tragedy, the energetic young company Voices Found Repertory brings together old and new theatrical forms to create an intriguing interpretation full of poetry, mystery, and humanity.

The familiar story— about a monarch who seeks to repair his broken state, oblivious to the fact that he himself is the corrupting cause—  might be relevant to our historical moment, but director Nick Hurtgen is hunting rarer game than obvious political satire. He attempts to bring a human dimension to the myth, while using ritual and movement to sound it’s uncanny depths, where archetypes lurk, their movements forming the substrate of our conscious lives. This is incredibly difficult to do without seeming obscure or pretentious, but these honest, committed actors pull it off with neither shrieking histrionics nor avant-garde floor-rolling.  Hurtgen has created a coherent movement vocabulary and a symbolic structure that overlays the plot and underscores the play’s themes with great integrity. The overall impression is of watching a play from an alien culture. Not all of the ritual gestures are instantly readable, but they clearly mean something, and that, combined with excellent mask-work and genuine performances, means we can connect with the action on a feeling level, even if we can’t put its meaning into words.

The action takes place around an altar, furthering the sense of a ceremony. Each actor wears a unique mask with large eye holes,  with the area around the actor’s eyes darkened, giving them the look of primitive vase paintings. In moments of great drama, some of the characters remove their masks. As in ancient Greek theater, the dialog sections alternate with movement sections, but the latter vary in tempo, mood, and style. Some are explicitly rituals, with characters representing the gods taking part; others reenact flashbacks, such as a rousing fight scene where the enraged Oedipus single-handedly slays King Creon’s entire entourage. An intimate scene between Oedipus and Jocasta has a stylized erotic intimacy,  complicated by Oedipus’ growing suspicion that his queen might be his mother. The actors bring seriousness to their roles; as the title character, Hannah Tähtinen dominates the stage with authority and stature, but underplays Oedipus’s arrogance with an evident desire to reassure the people that she is in control of the situation. The above-mentioned scene with Kim Emer’s Jocasta is subtly and beautifully performed. Jake Russel Thompson brings a hint of fun to the eccentric seer Tiresias, and Hurgen displays fine maskwork as a herdsman brought in as a witness. The chorus uses movement to show mixed feelings, signaling loyalty with their hands, for instance,  while signifying doubt with their masks.

The play’s darkness and self-doubt have a surprisingly contemporary ring, that might be even more poignant for this company of millennials. One movement section plays out to a bittersweet pop ballad; a fitting mood for someone whose life has been set up for disaster by forces beyond his control. Many philosophers have found in Oedipus an archetype of the modern identity, whose self-possession and fee will are illusions emerging from innumerable circumstances of historic, cultural, and economic forces: selfhood as a rigged game. Existentially, he is a failed hero who couldn’t face the truth— symbolized by putting out his own eyes. The strength of Hurgen’s directorial approach is to simultaneously act out all the play’s dimensions: social, personal, psychological, and ritual. The mysterious actions of the masked gods intimate the deep unknown forces that govern the psyches of even the most powerful men.

On a personal note: the play begins with the chorus chanting several words in Greek. I’m no Greek scholar, but I think I recognized the words for “pity” and “fear,” which happen to be the terms Aristotle used for the proper feelings elicited by tragedy to evoke the famous catharsis, or emotional purification. The theater of Ancient Greece was by all accounts extraordinarily powerful; the only time I’ve experienced anything like it was seeing Lee Breuer’s postmodern Oedipus at Colonnus, where the blind Oedipus was played by the black Gospel group the Five Blind Boys from Alabama, and the chorus was a bleacher-full of gospel singers dressed in colorful robes as if for church. The play’s text was incidental; the power of the singing brought the audience to tears time and again. After the show I felt wrung out, but cleansed.

Voices Found might not be aiming for that level of catharsis, but they have created an original interpretation of one of the foundational texts of Western civilization that displays its complexity and mystery, while making it fresh for a new generation.

Voices Found Repertory presents

Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

playing through January 20 at the Underground Collaborative

https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/3225375  

by Jeff Grygny

The Milwaukee Rep’s new production of Animal Farm opens with a pantomime: the players, dressed in filthy jumpsuits, laboriously drag a prop beef carcass across the stage. Theatrically (if improbably, considering the laws of physics) they flip it over their heads and onto a stainless steel gurney. Offstage it’s wheeled, and they head back for another one, This repeats a few times, to the sound of harsh industrial music, until a supervisor appears and tosses a simulated slab of meat on the floor. The players pounce on it, ripping it to pieces, and devour it greedily. This—workers desperately struggling for a tiny portion of their labor’s product—neatly encapsulates Marxism in one image, and provides the springboard for George Orwell’s extended metaphor of the descent of the Soviet State from revolutionary idealism to brutal dictatorship. His book achieved great success in the US, even becoming part of many school’s reading lists; an Aesop’s fable about the evils of communism (of course, it’s just about communism. Of course). Often mislabeled an allegory, Animal Farm is the bluntest of satires; it’s no more an allegory than the elephant and donkey of political cartoons. This production particularly, under the direction of May Adrales, is as subtle as a steel bolt to the skull.

It is really unfair to compare this Animal Farm to the one performed a few years back by the imaginative Quasimondo Physical Theatre, which was held in an actual barn, with charmingly rendered life-sized animal puppets. Orwell’s story gets whatever fun there is to be had from the amusing reduction of Stalin’s regime to barnyard politics. This  relentlessly literal production,  on the other hand, has little patience for fable: the actors carry abstract metal emblems of their particular animals. They are barely playing animals at all, but rather certain types of human characters. Moreover, following the artistic dictum that corruption is best depicted by making everything look as rotten as possible, the setting is a dismal abattoir, with cracked concrete floor and stark tile walls skewed in uncomfortable geometries.

Adrales wanted to convey “cruel and harsh labor conditions,” “soulless industrial and immigrant farms,” and “images of poverty, homelessness and extreme hunger.” So doing, she expands the frame of the narrative to encompass capitalism, be it multinational corporations exploiting  third world workers, national leaders chanting “jobs, jobs, jobs,” while siphoning off geysers of cash to billionaires, or even our own local piglets, making life harder while slurping money from the teats of their wealthy donors. All this is very clear. But since there is no real suspense or dramatic tension, the play becomes a grim, masochistic ritual. Well-executed movement sections, rhythmic and ceremonial, also create the sense of the retelling of a cultural myth. When the play reaches its depth of horror— the public execution of prisoners held on trumped up ideological crimes— it pulls the punch,  acting out the brutal murders upon cute stuffed toys. And though many in the audience might be grateful for this little mercy, it’s still quite disturbing.

The production really shines in the actors’ warm-hearted performances of their poor, put-upon human beasts. Stephanie Weeks and Deborah Staples  play workhorses who really want to believe that their leaders have their interests in mind, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  Jonathan Gillard Daly, as a wise old donkey, represents the lumpen intellectual who, though powerless, sees exactly what’s going on, while Melvin Abston show us the fear that lurks behind the despot’s bravado. Tiffany Rachelle Stewart gracefully embodies the role of a filly who abandons the commune for the promise of sugar cubes and pretty ribbons; in her second role she runs away with the show, channeling every fork-tongued official spokesperson we’ve seen over the years, straight-facedly reciting the most shameful affronts to reason, logic and common sense, and getting away with it. Such gross absurdities would be funny if they weren’t so awful: ha ha, comrade. In this way, Animal Farm shows the cynical tactics of despotic con artists effectively back-footing potential opposition with a steamy haze of lies, threats, and empty rhetoric. Ian Wooldridge’s efficient adaptation condenses much of the book’s extraneous action, but leaves a few niggling plot holes unfilled.

Overall, this production makes its sobering statement clearly and powerfully: above all, that the only thing more outrageous than the lies that leaders tell is that others continue to follow them. It’s at the least a lesson from history that things will not get better by themselves, and a warning to those who fight for equality, lest they become the evil they rebel against. Maybe the only true ray of cheer in this nasty little fable will be found when it stops being so true.

Milwaukee Repertory Theater presents

Animal Farm

based on the novel by George Orwell

Adapted by Ian Woodridge

Directed by Mary Adrales

playing through February 11

www.milwaukeerep.com

by Jeff Grygny

Social conservatives dream of it; avant-garde artists mock it; scholars find it “problematic:” the normal.  For the holiday season, Off the Wall Theater has gone in an interesting direction, mounting a very competent production of that warhorse of community theater, Arsenic and Old Lace, which is all about what is what definitely isn’t normal. Like a whole subset of American comedies, including  You Can’t Take It with You, Auntie Mame,  Bell, Book and Candle, and A Thousand Clowns, the show clashes oddballs against conventional society to draw comic sparks. And after a year of the digital clown show that passes for the news these days, it’s nice to be able to sink into a silly period comedy. But as with anything from director Dale Gutzman, the show wields a sting—even if this one is pretty gentle.

Joseph Kesselring’s 1939 script hits all the marks of a screwball farce: a smart, affectionate couple, a cast of odd but lovable characters, and a plot that gets progressively more unhinged until it suddenly resolves, just in time for the curtain. As the couple in question, Brittany Meister and Mark Neufang do a fine job channeling Cary Grant and Constance Bennett, her smart confidence playing off his febrile anxiety. But Neufang’s Mortimer Brewster has a problem: as he puts it “Insanity runs in my family—it practically gallops.” Larry Lucasavage seems harmless enough as Uncle Teddy, who thinks he’s Theodore Roosevelt, and the two sweet little old aunties, Abby and Martha, seem like neighborhood saints—until they display a penchant for poisoning lonely bachelors with elderberry wine, that is. And burying them in the cellar. In these roles, Marilyn White and Michelle Waide steal the show, obviously having a wonderful time proudly explaining just how they “helped” 12 old men to a decent burial among caring friends (and really, what more could you ask?).

Gutzman plays Jonathan Brewster, a bona fide psycho killer, who returns to the ladies’ house on the lam, with a shady plastic surgeon in tow—played by Robert Zimmerman (with surprising warmth, considering that Peter Lorre played the part in Frank Capra’s 1944 film adaptation). Rather than delivering these characters as the straightforward villains of the piece, though, Gutzman skews goofy, making them as much buffoonish as sinister. Meanwhile, the ever-versatile Jeremy Welter appears in four different roles, variously disguised in outlandish makeup and campy characterizations. With its vintage narrative style and a naturalistic set by David Roper, showing a comfortable 40s middle-class parlor, the show is as cozy as an old pair of slippers; just right for detoxing from the season’s enforced obligations of religion, family, and commerce.

But one of Gutzman’s recurring themes is the hypocrisy of so-called “decent society.” By turning the villains into clowns, he points, like the silent Spirit of Christmas Future, a bony finger at our collective tombstone.  It makes perfect sense that the subversive Capra should choose this play for his escapist wartime comedy. Though ostensibly a farce, Arsenic and Old Lace can’t entirely evade it’s none-too-subtle symbolism.  Can it be accidental that the ethically-addled Brewster clan arrived in North America with the pilgrims? As the French historian Michel Foucault pointed out, what society deems normal is actively constructed by institutional authorities: the church, the medical establishment, and the police. These institutions, which are all represented in this short play, create —by violence, if necessary—the invisible walls that delineate the normal from the deviant, the criminal, and the diseased. We hold our small talk over the bones of the innocent murdered.

Merry Christmas, right? But does this mean that good manners are necessarily hypocritical? Not at all. If anything, the world’s violent history would seem to recommend being even kinder to one another. And yet, this light comedy rests on the always-useful-to-remember premise that one may smile and smile and still be a villain.

Off the Wall Theatre presents

Arsenic and Old Lace
by Joseph Kesselring

playing through December 31

www.offthewalltheatre.com

It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.                     Giles Deluze

by Jeff Grygny

Genre fiction is the culture’s subconscious; beneath the recycled tropes, plots and characters, we can sense the unspoken anxieties and drives of our collective dreaming. This can certainly be said of The Depths, a tightly-focused study in claustrophobia and paranoia that is currently on offer by Quasimondo Physical Theatre. With the economical storytelling of the graphic novels that it strongly resembles, playwright/director Andrew Parchman delivers an entertaining, if chilly, Kubrickian satire of neoliberal technocracy.

We discover Lilith Hooper, a willing subject in a high-tech experiment fronted by a giant corporation with interests in undersea operations. In the interests of maximizing their labor force, she is dosed with a drug called “Ink,” that enables her to remain fully functional 24 hours a day. To make the study even more intense, she’s been submersed in a high-tech diving suit, seven miles below sea level, solo, for almost a month.  We see her performing banal and repetitive tasks, supported only by a spotty audio link with a remote mothership, regular visitations by a robotic drone that siphons off her bodily wastes, and an incredibly chirpy AI assistant—whom she’s come to loathe. The only novelty comes from her occasional encounters with deep-sea fauna.

A visual artist and extraordinarily gifted sculptor, Parchman approaches his tale from a design perspective, fashioning spare, monochromatic compositions like ink-wash illustrations. His elegant puppet creations express kinetic intelligence and character. Behind a stage-wide fabric scrim that diffuses light sources into little nebulas and blurs details to a fuzzy video-like quality. Figures  materialize out of velvety darkness, hovering  like unmoored Freudian imagoes: playful fish, the boxy submersible drone, an adorable sea slug, a terrifying face-hugging squid-creature, and a giant angler fish whose first appearance is an epiphany of human smallness in the face of the unknown. This is a show about bodies, not faces: all the performers are encased in skin-tight fabric that covers every inch of flesh; all we see of Hesper Juhnke’s Lilith is a mask-like strip of eyes behind a transparent visor.

The extremely limber cast becomes the scenery as well as the characters. In varied, athletic movement, created by Parchman with the ensemble, they sometimes seem to fuse together as a single organism, or float Juhnke’s body around to simulate weightlessness. She holds the action admirably, nearly always onstage, and even though her face is concealed, she projects a strong character of determination and courage. Effective voice acting by the ensemble succeeds in the genre task of not throwing us out of the narrative. Interestingly, the visuals have the most power when they seem like a film projected on the fabric screen, when we forget that the action is taking place in actual 3D space, animated by living bodies.

Within his austere palette, Parchman ranges from goofy humor to cosmic horror. Everything has the sterile, institutional mood so familiar to fans of anime such as Akira and Ghost in the Shell—not unlike the modern workplace, where petty routines and insipid cheer mask covert agendas. As Lilith begins to depart from corporate protocol, she experiences anomalies that are first annoying, then disturbing, then finally becoming a sanity-threatening vortex.

We’re left to decide for ourselves whether she succumbs to a high-tech rapture of the deep or is the subject of far more fantastic designs. Either way, The Depths paints a creepy picture of technological over-reach and late-stage capitalism; an acerbic warning that, as we are more and more drawn into the virtual worlds of social media and computer games, it’s still a survival skill to be able to tell reality from delusion.

Quasimondo Physical Theatre presents
The Depths
written and directed by Andrew Parchman

playing through December 10th

Danceworks Studio Theatre, 1661 N. Water St.

http://www.quasimondo.org/tickets.html

by Jeff Grygny

“When you have eliminated the impossible,” goes Sherlock Holmes’ famous aphorism, “whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Sounds simple enough—but when we confront the blooming chaos of life, sorting out all the possibilities (as Doctor Watson often found) is less like subtraction and more like fractal geometry, wherein a simple operation repeatedly performed generates baroque patterns of dizzying complexity.

Holmes and Watson, now in production at the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre,  begins with a straightforward process of elimination: choose the real Sherlock Holmes out of three possible claimants. But it quickly goes fractal, like one of M. C. Escher’s space-bending engravings, where we feel lost in the borderlands between truth, lies, fiction, and the fictions we tell ourselves about other people, even— perhaps especially— our dearest friends. The question “Who is the real Sherlock Holmes?” takes on almost metaphysical dimensions.

This is only the second production of Jeffrey Hatcher’s play, but in this crisp, elegant production, it already seems destined to a place in the highest ranks of Sherlock Holmes adaptations. The moment you step off the ferry that transports Doctor John Watson to the ominous island sanatorium, you enter a hall of mirrors where appearances flaunt themselves as truth from every angle, only to be contradicted by other equally plausible claims. The mystery sets its teeth into you and never loosens its grip for the play’s entire 80 minute running time. As in the best of the genre, you match wits with the detective, trying to be a sharp as Holmes would be, noticing every small detail that might be the key to the puzzle. Aided immensely by the actors’ craft, the designers’ atmosphere, and the clockwork direction of Joseph Hanreddy, you’re doing headwork every minute, and the time flies by. It’s almost a pity there’s no intermission, as the lobby would without a doubt be buzzing with hypotheses.

This review will respect the playwright’s feeling that “It’s more fun not to know anything when the curtain rises.” Suffice to say, then, that the inmates tell different stories of the same event, which all seem equally credible and suspicious— complicated by the fact the Watson has made so many of Holmes’ adventures public record, making it easy for impostors (but how accurate are Watson’s stories, eh?). Not to mention that there are certain oddities and inconsistencies in almost every character’s words and/or actions. And when events reach out to the world beyond the island, things really get complicated. The plot’s construction  can only be called masterful, and steeped in Holmesian lore—which is what you’d expect from an Edgar-winning writer who’s previously penned two Holmes stories for stage and screen.

Hatcher’s latest offering is, you might say, in the vein of British showrunner Steven Moffat’s Sherlock and Doctor Who: having thoroughly digested the canon and hungry for something fresh, opening with dazzling cleverness, following up with seemingly insoluble puzzles and bold dramatic gestures (appropriate to the claustrophobic setting), then quickly wrapping things up without over-much attention to the picky details. It’s a splashy, showy approach, well in the mood of today’s entertainment preferences—and that’s not a bad thing. There might be enough information for the astute viewer to solve the puzzle—but you don’t have to. The great pleasure of Holmes and Watson is to be led into an inescapable maze, encounter heroes, villains, and victims, and then to be safely escorted out again.

The impeccable cast delivers the content-heavy script with unstuffy precision. Though the Rep brings in top talent from around the country, it’s nice to see two local actors hold their own in the leading roles: Norman Moses, as Watson, brings a touch of theatrical flair to the solemn proceedings, while Mark Corkins, as the head doctor of the asylum, manages to always seem like he knows secrets he’s not letting us in on. The three actors playing the inmates give strong, distinct characterizations with shades of pathos and sizable portions of humor, all orchestrated by Hanreddy with economical use of each moment. Bill Clarke’s set is grand and austere, enlivened by projected images of sea travel by Mike Tutaj. When we see the monochrome waves rolling over the walls, we’re immediately transported to another place and time. Sound designers Rob Milburn and Michale Bodeen create another character in the well-timed punctuation of clanging doors, reverberating bangs, and the clicks of keys in locks.

Sherlock Holmes is a 20th Century archetype: the man of pure reason. His sagas of crime and justice reflect the deep structure of the modern world—which is why he continues to fascinate us. Holmes and Watson is an admirable addition to the mythos. But more importantly, it’s a ripping good story. And if the outcome seems a tad improbable—well, it was the only possible solution.

Milwaukee Repertory Theater presents

Holmes and Watson
by Jeffrey Hatcher
directed by Joseph Hanreddy

playing through December 17

milwaukeerep.com

by Jeff Grygny

When I think back on The Performance Ecology Project, performed outdoors in the campfire circle at the Urban Ecology Center Riverside, I recall something like a green kaleidoscope: ever-changing figures in motion; people, animals, stories and poetry set to haunting music as the fading October daylight mixes with firelight against a leafy autumn backdrop, swirling and juxtaposing to create a complex weave, like the flavors of an artisanal meal.

It’s odd that my memories should be so impressionistic—considering that I created the project, crafted its script, and was there at all the rehearsals (not to mention playing ad hoc stage manager and lighting guy). But the show was the product of many minds: from the performers’ field notes and sketches, to the cornucopian artistry of director Brian Rott, to the voices of the many creatures whom the cast encountered over the course of five Sunday mornings immersing themselves in the urban wildspace of the Rotary Centennial Arboretum.  It became so much more than I had imagined—like a miraculous tree sprouting inside an alchemist’s flask.

The experiment was to see if somatic practices could enhance our ability to empathize with non-human life. This is not quite as flaky as it sounds; the sciences of animal intelligence and emotions have really taken off in the last decade, and biologists who might once have dismissed any such talk as naive anthropomorphism are now studying the tangible effects that animal experience has in the world. Our performer’s mission was straightforward enough: after taking a class in yoga, mindfulness, dance improvisation, tai chi, and theater games to ground them in the present moment, they ventured into the park on solo explorations: seeking some living thing to “interview;” to literally look into, listen to, and try to discern it’s unique voice (neurological research has found that such contemplative practices can alter our brain activity, letting us attend more to present sensations than to plans and schemes). The performers created performance sketches from their experiences, and also kept field journals, from which material the script was assembled. The goal: to explore a different relationship between human beings and the larger biosphere upon which we literally depend for life, though it’s too often forgotten in the midst of our tech-ridden days.

The show started with the cast leading the audience on little expeditions of their own, to get a taste of the process. The audience got into the spirit of the wild by howling like wolves, after which they gathered in either the campfire circle in a woodsy nook of the arboretum, or in the lodge-like second floor space of the Urban Ecology Center.  Rott’s company, Quasimondo Physical Theatre, co-produced the show, and like all Quasimondo works, the performance was a composition of movement,  music and spoken word, linked not by narrative but in a thematic montage of free-association logic, organized around the narrative structure of the fieldwork plus the personal journeys of the participants. There were allusions to the different somatic practices, to wandering in the woods and encounters with various living things, along with vignettes created out of Rott’s fertile imagination, plus episodes from the history of the universe culled from Italo Calvino’s humorous short story collection Cosmicomics. Incidental music, both sprightly and haunting, was composed and performed by Ben Yela on an open-tuned acoustic guitar, while multi-instrumental percussionist Jahmes Finlayson supplied a virtuosic flow of background effects from his table of exotic instruments from bull-roarers to bird whistles.

The players represent exceptional strength in physical theater: Yela and dancer Jessi Miller are Quasimondo regulars, while spoken word poet Kavon Cortez Jones has performed with that company; Sarah Best and Hesper Juhnke have theater education and devised theater backgrounds;  JJ Gatesman is a Shakespearean actor and fight choreographer. This depth and range of talents and skills produced a tight, complex show that would daunt many conventional actors to attempt. The ensemble showed great good-humored commitment, whether they were embodying squirrels, portraying spiders, interpreting the body language of flowers, and impersonating single-celled organisms or hydrogen atoms.

Some vignettes convey the childlike wonder of a goofy science cartoon; they were taken from sources that support the radical notion that humans not only don’t have a monopoly on sentience, but that some kind of feeling might actually permeate the cosmos to the atomic scale. This idea has gained currency under the names “the new animism” and “object-oriented ontology,” but can be found as long ago as in prehistoric cultures and as recently as 20th century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism”—not exactly child’s play.

There’s a lot going on all the time; the performers, speaking candidly about their fieldwork experience, demonstrate a wide variety of styles of relating to the wilderness, creating unspoken conversations of subtle complexity. Sarah Best fully embraces her mission: though her enthusiastic “hope to connect” initially seems rebuffed by the busy creatures she meets, she finds solace in the rain; later she finds a “tiny city” in a fungus-grown leaf, and she feels “like a predator” while spying on an unsuspecting lady duck. Hesper Juhnke similarly embraces the experiment: after a humorously mosquito-ridden meditation session, she deploys crystalline precision in her examination of a tiny flying insect hovering at eye level. Later, she has a semi-romantic encounter with a sapling. “Will you dance with me little tree,” she sings. “Feel the wind in your hair, I mean, leaves . . . We can take it slow.” Her comic embodiment of a hoarding squirrel comes from intent observation; equal parts intelligence and empathy.

By way of contrast, Gatesman and Jones seem to remain outside of nature looking in. Gatesman adopts the attitude of an explorer, scaling fallen trees and investigating empty spiderwebs, while Jones finds in nature a congenial setting for his poetic musings, but declines to engage with any actual living being. Ben Yela speaks of his existential anxiety in his wanderings: “It’s just life and death, life and death,”  he rants—but then he finds a sense of wonder in discovering a plant he’s never seen before: “What the hell are you?”  Jessi Miller is the social philosopher of the group, expressing deep ruminations in gestures and facial expressions. She becomes a growing tree, greedily grabbing resources: “You want water? MY water!” Later she delivers a mysterious soliloquy that conveys alienation; and then becomes the supervisor of the first road, satirizing the idea that destroying nature is serious, grown-up business: “Cut ‘em down, boys, they’re all the same.” Similar themes pervade the ensemble dance Miller choreographed: a shimmering flux of kinetic movements and images that explore humans and nature, power and dominion. After this section, the show still has humor, but it’s more pointed, darker in tone.

In a ritual gesture, the performers paint white tribal designs on each other’s faces while telling about their interviews with living things. They relate their mixed feelings about their observations: the litter, the intrusions of humans and technology, not to mention the unromantic experience of actual natural processes. Insects and animals, they realize, still have to hustle: it’s not always pretty and it’s not always fair. “This place is wild,” Miller says, “but it is not free. These trees are like pets, like an indoor-outdoor cat.”

Gatesman’s comic detective interrogates birds and flowers. He accidentally picks Best’s personified flower: she reacts tearfully. “There were things I wanted to do!” In the classic Oedipus trope of the investigator being the culprit, Gatesman turns on Juhnke’s squirrel and reveals himself as a predator. The cast howls from the offstage darkness, then stalks the audience on all fours, growling warily. The show ends on a ceremonial note, constructing a shape-shifting effigy out of branches, while leaves are tossed on the fire as an image of autumnal transformation. In keeping with the season, they acknowledge death and life as inseparable faces of each other.

There’s no question that humans are the top predators on this earth, and that our activities are terrible for other life forms. But environmentalists make poor progress when they just talk about how bad humans are. Performance ecology tries a different tack: if we learn to care a bit more about even one little life form, we might care more about the impact our actions have on the whole planet.

The Performance Ecology Project begins as the somewhat cartoonish adventures of six actors who go into the woods to do yoga and create a show about six actors who go into the woods and do yoga. There’s nothing terribly exotic or earth-shattering in their first-hand impressions of leaves, bugs and flowers. But to take the everyday and make it strange and new is the provenance of art, especially the avant-garde; through Brian Rott’s inspired staging, the performers’ energetic charm, and the novelty of the show’s premise, the hour passes quickly and absorbingly. Not every moment fully works, but everything serves a purpose.

A well-made play is sometimes compared to a clockwork, each gear serving it’s specific function. This show is more like an organism—or the many different life forms in an ecosystem. That interconnectedness, including the interplay of varied voices and perspectives, gives this lighthearted essay a haunting feeling of mysterious depth. And somehow, through all the human filters, you might sense the stirring voices of numerous little lives, hurrying to get ready for winter—just like us.

Listen to Susan Bence’s  interview with Brian Rott and Jeff Grygny on WUWM’s Lake Effect

Read Megan Leonard’s review in the Shepherd Express

Read Mike Fischer’s review in the Journal Sentinel