| . | 03/31/2008
THEATRE LILA INTRODUCES THE ‘ART OF FUSION’ in FIRECRACKER & WONDER:lust
By: Deirdre Donovan
Firecracker/wanderlust
FIRECRACKER
Out of the pages of Anton Chekhov, some able artists at Theatre Lila have put together an original play that everybody can be proud of. Firecracker--one of two new “Art of Fusion” works premiering at the Samuel Beckett on Theater Row--is a fresh adaptation of Chekhov’s Untitled Play. Directed by Jessica Lanius, it cuts to the bone Chekhov’s early four-act play, and transports the story to small town America.
But you can count as its highest achievement the fact that it has preserved the farcically tragic spirit of Chekhov’s work without patronizing the playwright and without using any hokum. It is the story of Addison, and the unfortunate women who try to fit their neurotic lives into the pattern of his own desperate existence. Addison, the local school teacher and intellectual, is married to the lively, earnest Sarah. But their marriage hardly keeps him from dalliances with the pretty, young women that fall like magnolia petals at his feet.
Everyone concerned with Firecracker has collaborated on the show with boldness and originality. Lanius, as director, has rightly kept intact a lot of Chekhov’s language. But she has smartly cut out a lot of “unwieldy” sub-plots, expanded scenes with “Artuadian“ movements, and reduced the number of characters from 20 to 11.
What’s most striking is how Lanius appropriates the idea of the “American Dream” into the dramatic texture of the Untitled Play. Chekhov’s cast of characters included debtors and creditors, the nouveaux riches, upstarts, wastrels, and profligates. Her new work keeps these types--but launches its own theatrical energy and American idiom. One watches a waltz in the gazebo, flapper dresses, fancy-brimmed hats, and the pervasive devil-may-care attitude of the characters. The show mirrors a kind of Gatsby-esque world of greed, tinsel extravagance--or to borrow a phrase from H..L. Mencken:“glittering swinishness.”
All the action takes place inside Michael A. Reese’s excellent setting of a small town “somewhere between here and the Mississippi.” It’s the longest day of the year, the Summer Solstice. Addison,the witty protagonist, ideally captures the atmosphere of the day in four plain-spoken words: “Will it never end?”
It will. But there’s plenty of fine, jazzy moments that flame into view before the tragic last scenes. The most scorching? Perhaps Addison’s final encounter with the sensuous Anna, or the festive party scene in Act Two, where a pantomime-feast is executed with uncanny precision. The “Art of Fusion”, Theatre Lila’s innovative technique of movement and storytelling, is most brilliantly illuminated here.
The characters are laid bare with pitiless candor. Addison, superbly played by Scott Giguere, is the rogue who strays from his conjugal responsibilities ad nauseum. Scene by scene he roams from one woman to the next, indulging his sexual appetites, as if each partner was a sumptuously-rich praline.
Another standout? A fine performance is turned in by Jennifer Donlin, playing Anna. Donlin possesses a broad emotional range, and creates a tantalizing portrait of the beautiful young widow who is burdened with debt from her late-husband. As the evening progresses, you realize that Anna shares the sad destiny of all of the characters. They may well be dressed to the nines, but their humdrum lives spiral down in this small town.
This is a real gem of a play for Chekhov lovers. You can see the seeds of his future masterpieces in this work. Lanius has not merely tinkered with the master’s precocious play written while in high school. No, she has picked out the awe-inspiring music of Chekhov’s drama, and infused it with American sensibilities.
WONDER:lust
There’s a reason why WONDER: lust, the irrational and experiential modern urban fairy tale, conceived and directed by Theatre Lila’s Artistic Director Andy Arden Reese, is likely to drift into your dreams. It’s a dreamscape of a work, combining the unforgettable poetry and prose of Walt Whitman, Lewis Carroll, and Samuel Beckett. It plays in repertory at Theatre Row with Firecracker, and adds a more fantastical mode to their present “Art of Fusion” endeavor.
Certainly the set design is fitting to the piece. A larger-than-life bed occupies the bulk of the performance area. Completing the stage set is a towering, red ladder, a large picture frame suspended from the ceiling, and a 40-foot diaphanous curtain used as a backdrop. While one might not pay too much attention to the props at first, each will assume a vital dramatic function and eventually work in complete service to the drama.
The central character is The Woman, intelligently acted here by Vanessa Ronesco. She‘s the character on the brink of an existential meltdown, attempting to find the “I” within. Fortunately, she will be chaperoned in her identity search by a cast of 11 characters, including Alice (Kate Russell), The White Rabbit (Shadae Lamar Smith), The Duchess (Jessica Pohly), and, of course, The Queen of Broken Hearts (Susan Schuld). They magically materialize into the action from hidden trap doors, and a variety of curiously, shifting surfaces onstage.
This piece is essentially an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. But it’s radically refashioned with the lyricism of Whitman and the philosophical mode of Beckett. The Woman gradually learns how to deal with a chaotic world by listening to the topsy-turvy tales of the varied characters. But make no mistake--this is an adult fairytale. And its major themes ebb and flow with the rhythms of life and death. The Woman (in Alice’s world) will grapple, and rub against the terrors of exhaustion, misdirection, the weight of too much expectation, and other perennial tendencies of the human condition.
To see the production is to be chiefly struck by how influential, and resonant, the 3 authors--Lewis Carroll, Walt Whitman, and Samuel Beckett--remain to our cultural time. In the light of WANDER:lust, the audience can understand why these artists shocked us into recognition. Each grabbed us by the heart and soul, and thrust us into a whole galaxy of new ideas and stances. Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” sprouts fresh as ever in this piece. Beckett’s Happy Days is sprucely tossed in for sharp effects. And, naturally, Alice and her company keep apace of it all.
The show is awash with dream images and strange juxtapositions. It helps, of course, to be familiar with the 3 authors and their works. But you don’t need to “get” every literary connection to enjoy the work. There’s so much storytelling smuggled into the spontaneous, physical movements in each scene that not a beat will be missed.
Is WONDER:lust a coherent work? Well, one could quarrel with a few lapses of clarity, some minor sags, and, at times, frantic resolutions of its characters. But if Reese nods, you can still admire how she has taken these 3 authors, and put them in exhibition next to each other. Reese takes you on an astonishing ride through the terrors of logic and the vertigo of reason, and forces you to wonder about What If.
Beckett Theater, THEATRE ROW, 410 West 42nd Street, NYC.
Ticket Central, Tel. # 212-679-4200
http://www.ticketcentral.com
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