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Speed
Freaks [film]
Unconscious
Motives of the Motion Picture Industry |
VOICE
CHOICES Six Republican backroom strategists debate and celebrate the Gingrich revolution over lamb filet and crab cakes at a D.C. restaurant. A Harper's editor moderates as the discussion fulminates into absurdist mayhem and mania. Without resorting to a MacLaughlin Group sendup, director Robert Cucuzza shows the comic horror of conservative thinkers devising ways to buck up "backslapping guys in a warrior-like frenzy"–to convert Republican party boys into social-pro-gram slashers unafraid of "angry symphony goers" and of a welfare poor that might "stew in its Brezhnevian juices."
"Circle
Jerk"
This was clearly director Robert Cucuzza's reaction when he read the Harper's "Forum" "A Revolution or Business as Usual? Six Republicans in Search of a Message for Post-Contract America," a transcript of a discussion these "backroom strategists," as the magazine describes them, held "over lamb filet and crab cakes." One can only guess that wine also flowed freely at this elegant repast, for the ricocheting debate among such pundits as James P. Pinkerton, William Kristol, and David Frum is relaxed, witty, cynical, and smacks succulently of naked self-interest and cronyism. Enter director Cucuzza, who also plays Ralph Reed, director of the Christian Coalition. How to turn this transcript–pretty much verbatim–into theater? His strategy is arresting at first. His six actors (later joined by a seventh as the moderator) march in like automatons in dark suits, ties–striped or bow–and haircuts, preppy or military. Placed around bare, white-drape banquet table, they strike identical, synchronized poses furrowing brows, resting jutting chins on loose fists. The debate begins. Which government programs should they ax first? The title spins off Pinkerton's proposal that they cut farm subsidies first. "We can't really go to poor black people and throw them off welfare if we haven't gone first to rich white farmers and thrown them of welfare." They brainstorm for a rallying cry for their party. "Work," suggests Pinkerton, rejecting Reed's addition of "and marriage and childbirth in marriage." "Well, I want to go with the lowest common denominator. So I'll just stick with work. I'm not sure everybody wants to get married." Accompanied by music ranging from Herb Alpert-ish brass to the cha-cha, they debate at high speed, emit long gasps, laze into slow-mo. They puncture the air with raised fingers and freeze; they choke on words, repeating like a broken record. They hug, dance, collapse. As the debate moves along, the words become more garbled, the characters become grotesque. Cucuzza whips the actors into a frenzy of absurd behavior. Okay, surreal style for what some may find surreal proposals, but the text is now lost, and Cucuzza's frantic presentation has begun to pall with repetition. Clearly a director of talent, Cucuzza has tried to substitute style for drama and created a climax of style where none exists in the content. The director's vision is clever, his choreography riveting–at first–and his actors move with brisk synchronicity. James Urbaniak is a standout as the born-to-rule-so-anything-goes James Pinkerton proposing a new Republican rallying cry–, "Nobody is going to starve"–and I a new New Deal jobs program run by the likes of Colin Powell or Norman Schwarzkopf. At heart, though, the conception of Rich White Farmers is flawed, for it depends on unfounded assumptions. One is that blowing these words to outsize proportions will make their impact more powerful. The other is that everyone will find these Republicans horrifying and hilarious. I'd bet money there wasn't a Republican in the house.
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THE EIGHT-DAY
WEEK Even Mamet can't make-this stuff up: A play based on a Harper's Magazine forum, which gathered Republican strategists to discuss the party's agenda, opens tonight at the Ontological Theater. Rich White Farmers' dialogue consists only of the words spoken the forum participants. The title is "based on a line from the article, which read ÔWe can't really go to poor black people and throw them off welfare, if we haven't first gone to rich white farmers and thrown them off welfare,'" said director Robert Cucuzza "But there's a lot of other stuff that happens–there are songs, and there's a cha-cha dance." Hmmm...maybe that will make Lewis Lapham less cranky. Six Republican Party strategists sitting around a table in a Washington, D.C. boite searching for ways to capitalize on the Gingrich revolution may not seem like a recipe for riveting drama, but Hangdog Theater artistic director Robert Cucuzza begs to differ. When Cucuzza read the transcript of that evening in the March issue of Harper's Magazine, he was shocked by the participants' candor in dreaming up ways to slash welfare spending and guillotine the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The result is Rich White Farmers, scheduled for its second run in July. In the absurdist performance piece, the characters spontaneously burst into cha-cha dancing, and the score features selections from that hit album French Wine-Drinking Music. "I wanted the ideas and the horror I felt reading them illuminated more," says Cucuzza, whose group is based in New York City. Harper's, which has seen books spring from its pages, now foresees a whole array of cultural spin-offs. "We could perform the index," jokes senior editor Paul Tough. This [Rich White Farmers] is just the beginning."
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