| . | 06/22/2009
WATERWELL’S #9
By: Eugene Paul
If you have any doubt we’re living in a world that changes us, as well as daily, you have only to experience – or even just look at – the Internet’s unending capacity to inform us, to put us in touch with one another, to raise us up. Or down. For good. Or bad. Who decides what is good and what is bad changes, too. We are in the information river of no return, no choice about that. It is no surprise to meet the subject in the theater. What is surprising is the paucity of the confrontation Waterwell offers in #9, its meager joust with profound change. Waterwell can’t get a handle on it, not the handle of laughter, not the handle of fear. Waterwell just pokes at it.
We start out well, though. We’re sitting in a black cave, its walls plastered with designer Nick Benacerraf’s witty scheme of old newspapers overlaid with wires. Got it: electronics trumps print. A couple of monitors talk to us. Got it: we’re interacting with a virtual person, at least the top half, as if he were real, which makes him half half real but then it makes us less real to interact. Oh! But we do it all the time, every day and never even notice what is creeping up on us! Funny notion! We are in for some fun! Fun is fun, real or fabricated, isn’t it? Do we know the difference any more? Hey, this show is something!
There are experimental works and there are works in progress and there are expansions on a theme and there are attempts at putting all those efforts together. Waterwell’s #9 is a revue in flux, springing out of the given wisdom Marshall McLuhan flung at the world: “the medium is the message”. It stuck. And so is Waterwell, stuck trying to illustrate and to comment on the effects of technology on society. Takes strength, takes clarity, takes a single, dominant vision, not the committee that pastiched together this shapeless revue that starts promisingly, if only it were sustained. Our talented, talented cast scrambles up and down platforms, pretends to use a a floor mike for the numbers they perform because we’re all so used to seeing floor mikes they symbolize real amplification—if amplification is real in substance. Yet everyone in the cast is wearing a body mike. In this extremely intimate theater? Which no one uses? Aha: a comment. But – sometimes , sometimes, they do use them. We are now at last resort of comprehension which is: go figger. But before you can, Hanna (Hanna Cheek with the gorgeous eyes) is doing one of a number of numbers. Or Matt (intensely centered Matt Dellapina) is deeply involved in a story line about pregnancy, birth and a baby. Then, too, David (emotionally stirring singer David Ryan Smith) has family mortality on his mind, and Kevin (most talented of all, Kevin Townley) just wants to connect in one little story line or really connect in another. But the connections among them do not gel. Instead, we get one song after another, two of them good, one of them deeply winning because David has a wonderful moment. Look in vain, however, in the glitzy program for song titles or the times and the places we’re sharing. Or not.
Director Tom Ridgely does what he can with the underdone pudding Waterwell has concocted. He moves his people up, down, sideways, prone, running a line of constant activity since there is no corresponding dramatic story line. Not sufficient by any stretch of the imagination. Which just hasn’t been stretched by Waterwell. The McLuhan conundrum, 50 plus years old, is now a truism. Waterwell has short circuited as well as shortchanged itself. And us.
#9. At 59e59 Theaters, 59 E. 59th Street between Park and Madison. Tickets: $25. 212-279-4200 or http://www.ticketcentral.com.
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