Evan Webber Reports Back from Under the Radar

The New York Times is insufficient.

Yesterday (which was January 13, 2009) the New York Times reviewed some of the performances I saw at the Coil and Under the Radar Festivals last week in New York. The front page was drinking the blood out of its own wounds with particular relish that day, with Israel, "a paradigm of unity and mutual support" explaining the justice if their invasion of Gaza, and George W. Bush explaining the last 8 years by quoting Frank Sinatra, as he saddled his horse for Texas. This is the context in which the art -or at least three of the works I saw - was deemed a success.

One of pieces that was not reviewed in the 'Times was Liga: 50% reward and 50% punishment. It begins with a film showing performers leaving the stage. They congratulate each other on a job well done, descend into awkward silence, and then get picked up and trundled off by their parents. It's only when the actors enter the real stage after the film's finished, playing the show as a kind of flashback, that we realize how we've just been reminded of something crucial about performance: engagement, recognition, evaluation occurs after the fact. The only realtime experiential responses are amazement, or horror. Thinking comes later, if at all. Reminded thus, we watch more generously, as if we were a theoretical audience; we watch and wonder, "What are these humans up to?"

The proscenium stage at the Public is full of typical 21st century art-performance detritus: a blow-up palm tree, a ladder to nowhere, a cafe-table, bean-bag chairs. A serious European technician sits behind a tangle of wires at a banquet table with an open macbook pro. You have seen this space, these objects, before, but the performance that quickly occupies it is entirely surprising: a delicate, honest psychological study of childhood and the formation of identity, built out of performances that are detailed to the point of appearing at times totally abstract. Parents, or people who care for young children will probably recognize the origin of the performance material instantly (the actors are pretending to be kids) – with pleasure and amazement and perhaps a touch of sadness. But I wonder if the childless may be in a more fortunate position; they get to see what at first appear to be monkeys or zombified people - or unformed souls in a void - be nudged and shocked into the shape of adults, selfish and mostly fearful, but not entirely cowed, and more than capable. And by the time the performers start acting like adults, socializing and drinking beer, we realize what they really were, or are: kids. When the child-adults confront the difficult collaborative project of determining what is reality, we see then not just the fragility, but the troubling necessity of illusion. This is political realism, and we are better equipped for survival for having seen it. It also gives us something theatre doesn't give very often: a sense of responsibility. Did the 'Times avoid in on purpose?

Brecht, (by way of the book of Müller interviews I bought for the ride home): one is always overtaken by success before the real impact can occur; the success nullifies the impact. In a festival (and maybe New York is just a permanent festival) the prospect of success overwhelms the possibility of impact. Maybe at present, a work of theatre needs to be seriously flawed as well intelligent and emotional in order to ensure sufficient distance between the moment of its being seen and the moment of its necessity for us as an experience.

I was only half-joking when I said, during one the semi-formal discussions at the festival, that the most impactful work for me would be the work I never get to see, but only hear about from others. The permanent distance lets it occupy a utopian place. The necessity of illusion, a false horizon by which we may nonetheless navigate.

The necessity of illusion is also at the core of Architecting, the endless new work by TEAM, which stands for Theatre of the Emerging American Moment. TEAM is great - has a great name, I mean - because it freezes every moment in their theatre as an image of optimism, precariously close to arrogance, hung in a vacuum. (TEAM's visual analogue might be Norman Rockwell.) An example: Architecting is staged in the Public's amphitheatre, and the first wonderful irony of the show is being told by an usher that one can “only see well from the front.”

Architecting brews Gone With the Wind, Katrina, Hollywood, real-estate development, and everything else into a gumbo of contemporary Americana. The metaphor is gross, but apt: it's a little spicy, a little slimy; it's made of things that come from a swamps and soupcans. And it's maybe delicious, if you were raised on it. The reviews for Architecting have been very generous.

The ambition of the work is to redeem the spirit (if not the art or ideas) of Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell, and through her, all of blood-stained and innocent American History, Black and White, North and South. It's strong when it's coherent and quiet and morally ambiguous and totally un-redemptive: in one of the many plotlines, a Scarlett O'Hara impersonator crashes her car and then goes on a road trip with a sullen gas station attendant, only for him to crash her literary beauty pageant in drag to compete against her for the crown. The two stand on stage, and there is nothing to say, there is no winner. I feel like this is actually the Emerging American Moment: the shame of the abandoned beauty queen, the haunted young man in a dress wresting a microphone away from her. The play should end here - it could end well. But it slides instead into the schizophrenic vision of a liberal megachurch, into the desire for an America cured of history through old fashioned fire-and-brimstone. Only colour-corrected and secularized for New York. Maybe Architecting reflects how desperate things are in the USA but one wonders how long it will be into the Obama presidency before TEAM's name will start to feel like a curse.

Where Architecting trips itself, Ray Lee's multi-disciplinary work Siren walks cautiously (in a cold, dark room at HERE Arts) by creating a world of dangerously spinning amplified speakers and red LED's on tripods, and by not saying anything out loud. The instruments look like everything in America: TV news about the war, the sleeping refineries of the New Jersey night, the broken end-of-history promises. And they sound like crimes and natural disaster and imminent destruction, all while being mesmerizingly beautiful in their presence as objects. While the machine choir comes to life under the attention of the two performers (Lee is one of them) the audience moves around the room in the safe areas demarcated by a snaky rope, listening to the song change with our changing positions. The pair who adjust the pitch and turn the spinning world on and off are dressed like silent-film comedians and they weave their way through the madness like Chaplin on his way up the Klondike trail in The Gold Rush. At the end, when the tramps turn everything off, they stand still like Keaton does after the house falls on top of him and he comes unscathed through the window. Siren's imaginative achievement is that it lets us pretend for a moment that we all can all survive the scary beauty, without lying to us and saying that we all will.

Irish rockstar theatre company Pan Pan's fairy-tale mashup, called The Crumb Trail, has a similar courage. In telling a hacked-to-pieces Hansel and Gretel it too finds a way to imagine without lying. It too is mesmerizing. But instead of finding an poetic (possible, possibly useful) image of the world through a single formal constraint, it finds the real world in images without any restraint. Or tries too. It fails where it reaches the end of the artist's ability to consume and recombine, and metabolize it fully, leaving nothing intact or exotic. Only artists with titanic hunger can create this kind of work, and, at least in the Western tradition, that kind of hunger only came out the debris of the 20th century, the one that ended in 1989.

Chinup's? Drinking? Disinterested masturbation? Check, check, check. The younger cast members inhabit this world more easefully than their elders. The elders (including the writer, Gina Moxley) take it more seriously, but most of the audience at P.S. 122 could find more interesting material on their phones in 2 minutes. Adopting the form of TV or internet, one also can't help but invoke the constant value-assessment of the TV viewer. Which is how I watched, with one finger twitching on the remote. One really good thing about The Crumb Trail: it makes you realize how exhausting being entertained is.

The best (and last) thing I saw in New York wasn't at any of the festivals, but was Young Jean Lee's new work The Shipment, produced by Young Jean Lee's Theatre Company at The Kitchen. It was the best on its own terms. There are other things that are funny and intelligent and programmatically attached to failure, but The Shipment is unusual because it's rigorous in its application of the former, and it doesn't fetishize the latter. The Korean-American Lee triangulates the experiences of Blacks, Whites and Asians, (that is, roughly speaking, the cast, the audience and the author) into a triptych about the Black Experience in America, in the process making a kind of touchstone for identity which proves no identity to be true or authentic. The first section is a scatological stand-up routine; the second the hyper-stylized satiric story of a rapper's rise to fame; the last is a kitchen-sink party scene (which brings the title into focus), equally brutal and banal. Hard stuff, but everywhere the work tempers its attack with a heartfelt desire that things start to get better for everyone. In their approach to the material, the actors, too, have a strange, determined ease to them, and it takes a while to remember what this quality is: it's confidence. Not bravado,  just the actual confidence of a group of people who are saying something complicated and true, and turning it into a proposal in front of an audience. The 'Times thought it was good too, but failed to note that as it reminds us of the rarity of such confidence, The Shipment also makes itself vital, and alarming, and possibly, important.

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Less than two weeks later, the news cycle has already melted George W. Bush into nothing and the 44th president has a special section of the ‘Times stamped with a big illustration of the White House that makes it look like an upgrade to Park Place (and Parker Brothers also releases a new version of Monopoly ­– a possible tie-in?). I take heart in the speed at which the news and the opinions turn into vapour. I am still thinking about the work.

Evan is a founding member of One Reed Theatre Ensemble, whose award-winning work includes Nor the Cavaliers Who Came With Us and last summer’s (never underestimate) the power. Evan’s latest work Antigone: A Clean House for the Dead Season, which was commissioned by and developed with the support of Crow’s Theatre Writers in Residence Program will premiere at Soulpepper in September 2009. 

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