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Speed
Freaks [film]
Unconscious
Motives of the Motion Picture Industry
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"Now
the Uncool are the Coolest of All" The glasses made famous by the likes of Clark Kent and Woody Allen are popping up regularly at New York's more outrŽ theatrical addresses. There they are, perched on the nose of David Latham, the shorter of the duo of hipster comics known as Premium Bob, in the team's new show, "Dobie McDobie," at the Flea Theater in SoHo. Erin Quinn Purcell, playing a lovelorn bombshell, dons the fashionably unfashionable frames in "Duet! A Romantic Fable," a sendup of American courtship at the Actors' Playhouse in the West Village. And isn't that a pair on one of those pointedly distracted guys in "Total Fictional Lie," the unslick performance piece at Performance Space 122 in the East Village, by the slacker troupe Elevator Repair Service? The eyewear of the brainy, the weakling, the social misfit represents a kind of visual shorthand: it proclaims the wearer's outsider status. Still, appearances can be deceiving. Mild-mannered Clark actually has superpowers; the neurotic Woody of the movies is, of all things, a romantic leading man. Similarly, the owlish players in the aforementioned downtown shows are anything but squares. Sporting the dorky spectacles are self-assured young entertainers who only look like lifetime members of the National Honor Society. Who they aspire to be, in fact, are hip exemplars of an emerging sensibility in performance art and comedy that anoints the outcast, that celebrates the nerd. To be nerdy these days, it seems, is to be cutting-edge. From Andy Dick, the irrepressibly geeky gofer on the sitcom "News Radio," to the performers on cable comedy shows like "Viva Variety" and "Show," to almost any character Jim Carrey elects to play, nerdiness is a true comic virtue, a sure sign of in-the-know sophistication. These clownish goof-offs are such self-conscious put-ons, so redolent of show-biz savvy, that the audience is always aware that the actor is "on" and not really playing a character. Their performances, cynicism posing as innocence, are emblematic of a seen-it-all, media-saturated age, a period in which nothing seems spontaneous and everything in politics and culture is suspected of being rigged, a time when the greatest humiliation of all is not to be in on the joke. A spate of new stage shows, occupying some of the smarter downtown precincts, are the newest outlets of what might be called nerd culture. Taking cues from such varied sources as Richard Foreman, Andy Warhol and Andy Kaufman, these quirky productions poke fun at the diversions of the egghead set. "Total Fictional Lie," for instance, is a deadpan lampoon of the washed-out Middle American characters who fascinate documentary filmmakers. "Dobie McDobie" takes on, among other things, the inflated myth-making properties of television news. And in "Madame Fury," at the Here Theater in SoHo, the comic actor Blair Fell and his company, Aunt Bea's Dilemma, make an all-out assault on that outpost of high culture, ballet. All three have some wildly amusing moments; in "Madame Fury," Fell provides some choice lines to a tyrannical, weight-obsessed ballet master based on George Balanchine, given to declarations like "What is a heart but an extra five pounds you should diet away?" But at other times the cleverness of these productions seems a bit twee, and even mechanical. The difficulty with this world-weary brand of humor is similar to the problem encountered in standing at a mirror and practicing a wink: the harder you work to induce the reflex, the less successful it can become. It's revealing that some of the best jokes are manifestations of old-fashioned physical comedy, as when Latham's Premium Bob partner, Paul Boocock, turns to the audience and flashes a charlatan's million-dollar smile, or when the ballerinas of the rival companies in "Madame Fury" do battle like tutu-clad ninjas, arabesquing to the death. Yet there is more than enough imagination and comic energy exhibited in each of these shows to anticipate, and desire, even bigger things from these companies. Elevator Repair Service provides the weirdest immersion in nerd culture: "Total Fictional Lie" is a kind of live-action version of the "Real Audio" cartoon segments created by Robert Smigel on "Saturday Night Live," interspersed with the company's jerky (and mesmerizing) dance sequences, choreographed by Katherine Profeta. In the hour-long show, performed on P.S. 122's bare stage, random scenes from actual documentaries -- including films about Paul Anka, the serial killer Aileen Wuornos, and a door-to-door Bible salesman -- are reenacted by the seven-member cast. The funniest features Robert Cucuzza as the Bible hawker, trying to close a deal with a nearly catatonic homemaker played by Leslie Buxbaum; the banal scene repeats twice, with the actors delivering hilarious approximations of the film subjects' accents. "We take oddahs," Cucuzza says again and again, and it's only after the eighth or ninth repetition that his meaning (orders) becomes clear, at least to us; Buxbaum remains blissfully oblivious. The gags here are a rarefied sort; they have to do with how at odds the language and movement of the theater are with everyday conversation and behavior. Under the direction of John Collins and Steve Bodow, "Total Fictional Lie" affords a fresh and surprising, if more than a little oblique, perspective. It's a perspective shared by "Dobie McDobie," with its crosscutting style and pop-culture references dished out to the audience at hyper-speed, and by "Madame Fury," which expects audiences to be on their toe shoes, too. These shows are, in their way, advanced exams as much they are entertainments, which only makes sense, since eggheads tend to do well on their S.A.T.'s.
"Frenetic
Applause for Paul's Wiggling Feet" It is among the most sublime pleasures of youth to stand relaxed and drunk at the edge of the dance floor for hours and watch everyone moving themselves rhythmically. Anyone who ever loved doing that, or still does, is in good hands with the group Elevator Repair Service. Its dances are of that casualness only experts can get away with. They achieve their effect without effort, like the movements of ordinary young people acting obliviously, without any artistic intention. This trick was at work in the Sophiensaele during the world premiere of "Total Fictional Lie", a production commissioned by the Berliner Festwochen. It is the eighth production by the company, founded in 1991 by John Collins, ex-sound-engineer for the Wooster Group. This time Collins directed with Steve Bodow. The story told is about famous early-60s singer Paul Anka (played by a woman). Paul is heard boasting that he shed 35 lbs to become a star. His fans are seen preparing parties, gossiping during slow dances, or proving incapable of buying religious booklets from a sales representative. And a serial murderess is justifying herself: she did it all in self-defense. Paul's wiggling feet make the most prominent appearance. They are all that's visible when he delivers a perfectly sense-free speech in New York and receives frenetic applause for it. And truly, Susie Sokol's feet are more amusing than a lot of what other people can express with their faces. In "Cab Legs," which Elevator Repair Service presented a few days ago in the Sophiensaele, Indian pop songs were the departure point for choreography. This time the seven-member group sets its cheerful controlled insanity to jazz melodies. If dance is freedom, sitting is imprisonment; the furniture piecesÊ-- around a white wall, the only set decorationÊ-- are subtle torture instruments: a sloping old hangdog chair, a squeaking wobbly swivelchair, and a crate that the actors squeeze into, contorting themselves absurdly. A factor apparently "outside the art" also contributes to the success of "Total Fictional Lie": the personality of the troupe. But even this is professionally manufactured. Because the performers are allowed their individual personalities, they come off like somebody's jolly housemates. And so you follow their performance with the warm-hearted sympathy you would have watching friends. But in life as in the theater, the nice ones are not always the most interesting. Pain and struggle, which sometimes help refine the pleasure of theater, are not among the offerings of the friendly traveling salesmen of ERS. A well-camouflaged insignificance prevails over it all. Translation by Scott Shepherd CurtainUp.com
Introductory Note: CurtainUp has, until now, remained a magazine of words and not pictures. Aside from the goal of being a "fast-loading" publication, the rationale has been that graphics interfere with Elyse Sommer's manifesto: "content, content, content".ÊÊ Something in the experimental theater group Elevator Repair Service's new production, Total Fictional Lie, prompted me to use my review as an opportunity to reassess this idea. Graphics can enrich content rather than serving merely as window dressing. "A picture," after all, "can be worth a thousand words".ÊÊ This radical notion in hand, I have prevailed on the powers-that-be to include the striking image you (hopefully) see above. I hope this does not lead to the wholesale inclusion of stock photographs that don't have a rationale other than making our pages "prettier," but I do believe there are times a picture does help us do our job. That said, the photograph above shows how the audience first meets the character of Paul Anka (Susie Sokol) in the opening scene of Total Fictional Lie.ÊÊ Collage is, of course, an art form in which material of different types is glued together to create an image. Usually, it produces a message that requires a bit of intuition but rarely much sophistication. As practiced by the Dadaists, it had an exuberant sense of humor that translated into a positive energy in spite of a provenance rooted in pessimism. The approach of Elevator Repair Service strikes me as a collage in which the media of words, music, sound clips and movement are glued together. Juxtaposed notions are not formally rationalized but there is nothing inaccessible about their work. It is joyful in spite of what seems to be a cynical core and yes, there is a distinctive Dada influence at work here. In this latest effort, the repair people have chosen a frolic on the phenomena of documentary films. Drawing words and attitudes (but no video clips, this is decidedly low tech) from four seemingly unrelated pieces, they romp from an examination of the career of Paul Anka (from a film called Lonely Boy), to the "selling" of Aileen Wuomos, the infamous serial killer, to door-to-door Bible peddlers in the 1960's. (I confess I'm not quite sure how or where the fourth film, Vernon, Florida, fits in.) The parts are not sequenced and sometimes trespass on each other. The substance, such as it is, is stitched together with affectingly dippy dance numbers that seem at first to be irrelevant but later to be the point. Amused by the way people conduct themselves when being interviewed, the hour-long performance maintains its offbeat sense of humor, never losing momentum. After culling the films for a few choice moments that are re-enacted (often through fractured lenses) onstage, the group, aided by choreographer Katherine Profeta, has reinterpreted the body language it has discovered into movement that teeters on the thin line between being assured and authoritative, on the one hand, and awkward and uneasy on the other. A large wooden box (shown in the picture above) is a portal from, in and to which many of the characters move. At one point, three of the limber actors find themselves in it at once. Most of the rest of what makes its way onto the naked stage is of a type was likely found discarded on the street -- a broken office chair, a plastic tub seat, etc.Ê It takes a talented group of people to undertake this sort of project and render it both theatrical and entertaining. Elevator Repair Service brings together a group of people who have the wherewithal, stamina, spirit and awareness to make it succeed. I'll end with a telling Village Voice quote from one of the two directors of Total Fictional Lie, John Collins: The real tension is not about artists doing things they know people won't understand -- it's about artists having a certain faith in their audience's ability to go with them to a place they believe in.
Note from Bob: This is one of my all-time favorite bad reviews. 'Total
Fictional Lie' is truthfully a bore A total lie: If it's a show from New York City, it must be good. If a small local theater troupe had conceived and performed Total Fictional Lie, which opened last night at the Wexner Center, central Ohio audiences probably would be much less patient with the hourlong show's incoherent trivialities. Columbus theatergoers should keep an open mind when watching self-styled experimental theater, but they should open their eyes and ears, too. (Sometimes, the Emperor really isn't wearing any clothes.) Even any central Ohio residents who still haven't shaken off a cultural inferiority complex shouldn't let themselves be fooled by Elevator Repair Service's growing reputation as an experimental New York troupe. Total Fictional Lie is virtually a total bore. The disjointed, unrepairable show allegedly focuses on our culture of hype, using quoted lines, scenes and characters from various documentary films. Collage can be a legitimate style, but Lie's words and movements don't add up. Here's what passes for a dramatic arc: First, a young woman emerges from a box. Then two young women get into the box. Finally, a third young woman tries to squeeze in, only to discover that all can't fit–so one woman stands up. If this was a standup comedy act, audiences might think their legs were being pulled. Instead, the first woman shakes her legs and feet a lot –while upside down in the box. The range of music, from jazz to Latin rhythms and a techno-rock beat, is interesting, especially blended with the movement. The seven-person cast is fun to watch whenever they synchronize steps and gestures to the music, apparently repeating visual "quotes'' from films. A few potentially interesting characters are introduced with a few lines of dialogue–a fat kid who grows up to be a sexy pop singer, a religious Spanish woman, a defiant female serial killer–but none are developed. One man sports heavy black eyebrows, a la Groucho Marx, but where's the punch line? Cast members Leslie Bluxbaum (Mrs. Pager), Robert Cucuzza (Salesman), Rinne Groff (Missy), Susie Sokol (Paul), Tory Vazquez (Jordana) and Colleen Werthmann (Rita) helped to develop the largely scriptless piece. Trendy but tiresome, playful and precise but meaningless, Elevator Repair Service often amounts to little more than an off-off-awful-Broadway aerobics class. An uncomfortable truth: No arts troupe or presenter is immune to failure. Even the Wexner Center can stumble, even in the midst of an otherwise impressive 10th anniversary season. |
"Zombie
Aerobics"
Hype of various kinds is in fact Total Fictional Lie's subject. The text is a set of cunningly deployed, mix-and-match snippets from various documentary films, so that we hear teen pop star Paul Anka's manipulators, an anonymous Bible salesman, and the multiple murderer Aileen Wuornos all mouthing off–sometimes in counterpoint–about whatever particular piece of b.s. they're trying to sell us. Between and among these verbal manipulations of others come physical manipulations: At the opening, Paul (tiny, darkly glowering Susie Sokol) emerges feet first from a wooden box; at various points two and then three of the cast's five females crowd their way into the crate and out again until Paul's finally forced back in at play's end. That it's women–except in "Paul" 's case–who manipulate themselves and each other into the box, often while the two men look on noncommittally, is a resonant point the group delicately leaves untouched by comment. The self-punishment performers (particularly dancers) go through for their art stands in for the internalized self-punishment of groups society classes as inferior. As its attitude would suggest, Elevator Repair Service isn't always forthcoming about its substance. ERS's standard tactic is dry, unemphatic comment, its principal target–the pervasive phoniness of the social structure we inhabit–both slightly facile and rather nebulous. The troupe could reach more daringly far, and grasp more fiercely, without losing its seemingly irrefragable cool. I know it could because its work here, under co-directors John Collins and Steve Bodow, has integrity, intelligence, and precision as well as imaginative skill; and its actors, especially Sokol and Rinne Groff, have talent for days. If that sounds like hype, try the trip from 46th and Broadway to 9th Street and First Avenue yourself. The minds are sharper, and the feet distinctly looser, Downtown.
The Theater
of Danger
A manager with the false eyebrows of our finance minister, a turkey dance repeated ad absurdum, a stammering press speech by Paul Anka–with his head in a box and his feet waving in the air–the bungled sale of a revised Bible edition, and a set mostly comprised of snack biscuits and three chairs: we're writing in the year 1998, and we're seeing perhaps the last disciples of Dada. With "Total Fictional Lie" Elevator Repair Service presents a genuine world premiere, more specifically a production commissioned by the Berliner Festwochen for the "Next Generation" series. Just like "Cab Legs" –a repertory piece which the New York performers already showed last week in the Sophiensaele– "Total Fictional Lie" forgoes a logical throughline and combines things guaranteed not to go together into a pageant of absurd miniatures. Seemingly dilettantish and half-rehearsed moments, enriched with artful pauses that strike a very unamerican tone of ennui, play on familiar avant-garde concepts. But unlike in "Cab Legs," here the spoken words are reduced to a minimum and replaced with delicate everyday or dance club gestures that allude to choreography, all around the hit singer Paul Anka, who is thrust into the foreground. In seats or in loose aerobic formation, when the seven-person ensemble undergoes its physical training under the direction of John Collins and Steve Bodow, a curious contrast is always written in their faces: grim seriousness in the "Surprise-Box Dance", flirtatious looks in "Dance of the Prisoners". The lack of coherence is accounted for–sadly–in an explanatory playbill: in its concept-raising phase the company brought home documentary films from the fifties, out of which a few of the fleeting subjects of the show were distilled. So neither the text nor the gestures are "fictional" but based on "authentic" US dreariness. A complete tour of the corporate halls of modern America– the strategic creation of pop stars, death penalty discussions, theology and door-to-door selling–recycled by ERS into ironic near-nonsense. Cultural Sociology 101? One seat over someone remarked that he spent the whole 50 minutes thinking of John Travolta. Which can certainly be very nice too. And a good beginning to a long night.
"This
Elevator Drops Through Media Madness" But "Total Fictional Lie" neatly lifts their words out of the frame. It then proceeds to twist and re-loop them into a live, deadpan montage of bite-size monologues and zombie dance numbers, which question whether any docu-media (even cinema-verite film) can reveal anything like the truth. Dry as sandpaper, cool as iced chai, the physical-verbal style of the Elevator Repair Service is Gen-X ironic to the max. It is also, if you don't mind the spare and repetitious formalism, quite smart and subversive - playing against conventional expectations to the extent that when the lights come up after a blackout, the scene hasn't changed. Executing Katherine Profeta's precise, simple line dances to beat-laden pop music so catchy it verges on the moronic, the seven actors under the co-direction of John Collins and Steve Bodow evoke life in a mass-media trance. Some of the women get literally boxed in, crammed into a smallish crate in a silent turf war of splayed limbs. One actor also uses the box as a sort of upside-down lectern, to "leg-sync" a taped speech by astronaut John Glenn. The scraps of spoken dialogue are as funny, and more pointed. Anka, quoted in shrill tones by glowering Susie Sokol, and his manager (poker-faced Scott Shepherd) brag about the complete physical makeover that helped turn Anka into a teen idol. (They both seem inordinately proud that after intense dieting and cosmetic surgery, the singer was altered beyond recognition.) In a sequence that skitters on the blade edge between hilarity and acute tedium, the Bible salesman (Robert Cucuzza) repeatedly and charmlessly hawks his wares to a totally disinterested woman. And Wuornos' nutty sociopathological logic reminds you that even in a democracy there are some people who should just be asked to shut up. Does Elevator Repair Service stretch its ideas about the banal manipulations of pseudo-celebrity too thinly, in a piece lasting barely an hour? Yup. And this work doesn't display the more developed, multilayered intensity of some other theatrical deconstructions of media madness. But these guys are onto something, and their irony isn't just a smirk or a style. It's a protest and a provocation.
"Elevated
Repair: Elevator Repair Service doesn't have to be funny, but they are." Often mislabeled a comedy group, Elevator Repair Service might more accurately be described as a 16-member performance collective. They don't, for example, perform conventional comedy sketches or improv. While they certainly set out to be–and are–funny, they don't like to be pigeonholed, and often their work emerges with a surreal or strange quality rather than being "ha-ha" humorous. They themselves admit they often don't know why what they do is funny. Yet their odd, enjoyable brand of experimental theater has been a staple of the downtown scene for almost ten years. A key aspect of ERS's process is that when they begin developing a piece, they don't have a clear idea what the project will be. They almost never work with an actual play, and when they do, they regard it as just one ingredient–along with movement, sets, costume– in the overall work. "When we set out," says artistic director John Collins, "we don't say 'It'll be like this.' We just try things, and if they make us laugh, we know we're on the right track." The group is so open to this method of discovery that sometimes the material needn't be funny at all, but simply ambiguous, or even quite serious. The development process is lengthy. For example, work on their next finished piece, Highway to Tomorrow, which won't be presented until fall, has already begun. Collins chalks up his ars gratia artis philosophy to the influence of the Wooster Group, which he first discovered through the 1986 book "Breaking the Rules" by David Savran. He since became even more familiar with their work as the group's sound designer for seven years, during which time he got to watch Elizabeth LeCompte's working methods up close. While the ERS aesthetic and product is different from the Wooster Group's, their development process is the real basis of comparison. The freedom, the democratic decision-making, and the intuitive approach to making art are all the same. The group tries not to predict what will happen, placing their faith in the rehearsal process for generating new material. Random accidents and mistakes made during rehearsal are often incorporated into the work. Adding further unpredictability to ERS's mix is the variety of the collaborators: non-actors work in tandem with trained thespians, and the designers and stage manager all get equal billing. A core chunk of them met while they were undergraduates at Yale, but this represents only a third of the full phalanx. All share a similar interest in incorporating research into performance, as well as a common (unconventional) sense of humor. Lately, ERS has been incorporating increasing amounts of movement into their work. Though the group has a director of choreography (Katherine Profeta), none of the members are trained dancers, and all of them collaborate on the moves. The most common working method is what Collins calls "translation action"; that is, taking movement material that is not dance and adapting it for the stage. Much of this material comes from watch films and videos, and from studying random people and borrowing their movements. Their movement aesthetic is one of awkwardness, reflecting the individual physicalities of the people involved (non-dancers all) and employed for comic effect. Sometimes the movement will be "translated" from one part of the body and grafted onto another. For example, the group might watch somebody in an interview on television and make a dance out of their hand gestures, or translate those gestures to the feet. Another popular source of material is cartoons. And while it may be impossible for a real human being to do everything a cartoon does, that is where the "translation" comes in. Their last new piece Total Fictional Lie (presented at P.S.122 in 1998) was initially to be about vaudeville. They began by watching the popular PBS American Masters documentary on that subject and ended up more interested in formal aspects of the documentary itself. They began imitating and playing with voices and gestures of the talking heads from the film. Then they took the hand movements from one of the film's interviewees, and the foot movements of an old Burns and Allen routine. Excited by this approach, they started watching other documentaries, making them the touchstone of the eventual finished piece. The piece they are developing now will be presented at HERE as a work-in-progress in late May, and will incorporate elements of an experiment they did last fall with F. Scott Fitzgerald novels. On April 24, Obie-winning Kate Valk of the Wooster Group will perform at an ERS benefit at HERE. As for future plans, Collins muses, "I'd be happier to be performing ten years from now with this same group of people than knowing the Elevator Repair Service had ten million dollars in the bank but were composed of some other group. Financial stability is important--and this particular company certainly doesn't off that--but it is very rewarding. There's not much else like it." Which, in a nutshell, is why we have experimental theater in the first place. |
