Sci-Fi novels: We

I stopped reading sci-fi around age 15. But I've returned to the genre recently, playing catch-up on works like Dune. I just finished We, a very early Soviet sci-fi novel (1921) written by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It's not just a brisk, zesty read, it's got artistic substance beyond most sci-fi. George Orwell cribbed a lot from We: the mechanics of his dystopia as well as a few big plot points—including the climax! Basically, We is the prototype for dystopic sci-fi: the protag awakens to his home culture's injustice, joins the revolution, and dies.

It's the 26^th century. The OneState is a domed city of glass, a beautiful image subverted by its reason: to more easily spy on citizens. Free love is enforced by bureaucratic forms; people have alphanumeric IDs rather than names, like Star Wars droids. D-503, the protag, has designed the first interstellar rocket. Maybe that's why he's drafted into an anarchist cell by erotic I-330, drawn into despair by her dagger lips (it may be a lefty book, but it's not enlightened).

And so on. Part of the novel's fun is seeing sci-fi tropes in their raw state—you can get the same primitive futurism when you watch Fritz Lang's Metropolis. But We also works as a novel, probably better than 1984. Zamyatin gives D-503 a vivid inner life: the novel's arc is D's breakdown, caught between the anarchist and the state. His insanity is electric in a Dostoyevsky-like way, oscillating between obsessive hyperclarity and fevered ravings. And that climax that Orwell lifted? Actually, both scenes are riffs on the Grand Inquisitor: the State's torturer justifies totalitarian measures by citing his love for the populace.

If We is a sci-fi riff on Dosteyevsky, it's is some cackling-scientist version, a trip to the future in HG Wells' time machine. Zamyatin is ironic to his core: the book ends with anarchy threatening to topple the OneState (yes!), but the hero's been lobotomized (umm…). Still, there's a dashing element of romantic adventure to We. Check out this descrip of the femme fatale, who's been smuggled aboard the rocket:

“[T]he huge blue sparks above, over the radio antenna, seemed to come from her, and the faint, lightning smell of ozone, also from her.”

That's right out of Buck Rogers!

We's not a great novel, but it's brisk & engaging. The reason to read it isn't its vision of the future (which is dated) or its investigation of totalitarianism (which, yeah, Orwell did better). It's the mad vivacity that Zamyatin infuses D with. He puts us in D's head then sets it spinning into insanity. Poor D, driven mad by lust, scientific abstractions, and the State. A weird, Soviet electric fantasy.

Corporate theater culture

The theater blogs today are all about Outrageous Fortune, a study of the not-for-profit American theater scene. Isaac at Parabasis & several others are blogging their way through the book. And I've been inspired by their comments, though I haven't read the book (yet). In one post, Isaac talks about the corporatization of not-for-profit theater. He quotes OF:

"You can't have an artistic system be corporate, because all the corporation is about is making money.  The current system neither makes money nor produces good art, so we're in a terrible bind."

Later Isaac wonders "if the problem is simply that a lot of ADs are bad at their jobs, but the structure is basically sound."

Now this is something I've thought about a lot. I believe that it's a huge problem across the arts: American culture has adopted the corporation as the model for human organization.* Private & public funding encourages this paradigm by requiring various features of the corporate structure (like a board of directors) in order to receive money.

I worked for 3 years at a large NYC theater company with a corporate structure. Despite being on the artistic staff, I felt as if I had no stake in the work onstage. The company produced widgets. Even in the commissioning of plays (which I was heavily involved in), conformity to corporate habit was enforced through a process of pitch submission & panel evaluation.

How do these theaters work? A board of directors looks at the theater's "numbers" (attendance, budget, awards & prizes) to evaluate whether they're best served by the AD. If he or she fails to meet the board's standards, he or she gets replaced. And so it goes throughout the company's hierarchy.

What's the upshot? It's terribly dehumanizing for employees and it produces insipid work for audiences. And that's contra the goal of art, which is to make all of us, on both sides of the fourth wall, more human and more humane. So, Isaac, no, the corporate structure is fundamentally unsound in this context. A theater company shouldn't be run along corporate lines.

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* And not just the arts: as but one example, education, esp. higher education, is run according to the corporate structure--to the system's detriment.

Romeo and Juliet (The Nature Theater of Oklahoma)

After a month off, I'm back in the habit of covering NYC theater & other work that catches my mind's eye. First up, an adaptation of Romeo & Juliet at the Kitchen.

Romeo and Juliet
The Kitchen

January 7, 2010

Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper (directors)

At its core, the Nature Theater of Oklahoma's Romeo and Juliet is about memory. The show recounts  impromptu summaries of Shakespeare's romance delivered to co-directors Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper. Most of the people they interviewed haven't read the script since high school (or they conflate it with West Side Story), and they're fuzzy on the plot—especially the convoluted ending (which lover merely feigns death?). But retelling the story, even in patchwork, inspires people: one subject moves himself visibly in recounting the tragic ending, another recalls a crush extolling the play in gym class, a third compares the work's catharsis to her feelings after the WTC attacks. These moments are lovely and human.

But the actors must struggle to impart individuality and texture to each inteview. They're directed to play in a hambone style, pronouncing words plummily (the “bal-CONE-y” scene) before a painted curtain right out of Dickens. The show sneers—and invites us to sneer too—at mis-rememberings like “What light through yonder window speaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the west!” This Romeo and Juliet is pretty damned funny, but it's got too much empty irony and hipster surrealism (why the 5-foot-tall dancing chicken? Dunno). Liska & Copper stage a wrestling match with Shakespeare, but of course they can't win. They do concede graciously, however, playing the balcony scene with lights down so we really listen to the words. Paying their interview subjects the same respect would add substance to an enjoyable but empty evening.

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Romeo and Juliet plays at the Kitchen (512 W. 19th St., btw. Tenth & Eleventh Ave.), closing on January 16. Tickets?


Photo credit: Kerstin Joensson

The Last Cargo Cult (The Public Theater)

The Last Cargo Cult

The Public Theater

December 5, 2009

Mike Daisey (writer)

Jean Michele Gregory (director)

In The Last Cargo Cult, Mike Daisey attacks a simple idea—money—from several angles. In a delightfully pinko series of slices and thrusts, Daisey detaches bills from their economic value simply by using words (which are also abstractions, right?), notes that it's illegal to burn a US dollar but not the American flag, and has ushers hand out the cash he's paid by the Public then asks the audience to decide if he's earned it.

Alone onstage with his yellow legal pad—but abetted backstage by director Jean Michele Gregory and a team of designers—Daisey is simply a storyteller, but an incredibly gifted one. He's got a knack for taking his own measure through remarkably candid self-disclosure. But he's less the heir to Spalding Grey—the resemblance is only formal—than to Kurt Vonnegut. A hilarious and dyspeptic observer of the human animal, Daisey weighs with equal irony a picayune moment in his marriage to Gregory and the mob behavior of hedge fund managers during last September's TARP bailout. 

Much of Cult describes Daisey's expedition to the South Pacific, where he met a tribe that uses cell phones but not money and worships a semi-mythical American GI in the form of a volcano. But the work is vitally political too; it broaches the taboo fact that on September 12, 2008, the world's economy nearly collapsed. Despite that seismic catastrophe, Americans do not have a post-9/12 mindset. Daisey means to provide a catharsis for our economic near-death experience. His success shouldn't be measured in the cash that audiences return to him but in the paroxysms of our laughter.

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The Last Cargo Cult plays at the Public Theater (425 Lafayette Street, betw. E. 4th & Astor Place), closing on December 13. Tickets?

American Treasure (13P)

American Treasure

13P at the Paradise Factory

November 28, 2009

Julia Jarcho (playwright & director) 

Julia Jarcho has written and directed a thriller about the blood curse of American history. A postmodern plot lifts its set-up from Dashiell Hammett—a waif asks a PI to find her sister's killer—but their search through history gets well and truly weird, more Pynchon than Chandler. It's not a spoiler to reveal that the theme of American Treasure is the genocide of America's native people, or that the spirit that animates this script is, in the end, an enigma.

Or it ought to be. American Treasure is compelling stuff, but it's also proof that playwrights should rarely direct their own scripts. With its fragmentary scenes and hopscotch structure, American Treasure should hurtle along like an Indiana Jones movie, albeit one written by Stephen King. But Jarcho saps her script by double- and triple-casting the actors, maybe to save cash or maybe cuz that's modern convention. But more actors would lend the conspiracy weight; in this show, some actors need to be hiding knowledge.

Still, I don't blame the performers. Jenny Seastone Stern, at least, has an uncanny presence that fits the show's tone perfectly (after her perfs here & in The Bereaved, I can't wait to see her again). Aaron Landsman, however, gets in the script's way, and ends up looking tense and confused. He doesn't communicate the double-meanings and dramatic ironies that the dialogue's packed with. But another director could've guided him better.

All this adds up to a stiff climax, which has Jarcho busily underlining the play's message instead of playing up the riddle of history. To say that American genocide is literally unspeakable makes a good graduate thesis but it's tough theater—although the lovely set, designed by Jason Simms to look remarkably like a human diorama at the Museum of Natural History, is itself a sort of winking clue that ironies can be staged. Jarcho's script gives me the heebie-jeebies; it's worth a read. But onstage, the mystery is missed.

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American Treasure plays at the Paradise Factory (64 East 4th Street, betw. Second Ave & the Bowery), closing on December 12. Tickets?

Photo credit: Rob Strong

Or, (Women's Project)

Or,
Women's Project
November 11, 2009
Liz Duffy Adams (playwright)
Wendy McClellan (director)

The ebullient Or, (comma included) is a period drama, a sex farce, a spy thriller, a backstage comedy, even a bit of a feminist burlesque. That Or, can be so many things without spinning apart speaks to the strength of its 17th-century protagonist, Aphra Behn. The ex-spy was the first Englishwoman to make an independent living as a poet. So playwright Liz Duffy Adams dreams up a pivotal night in which Behn must compose her first play while handling two lovers (one of each sex) as well as a former contact with intel on a plot against England.

Adams plainly adores her heroine. Lucky she's got Maggie Siff as her indomitable lead. Siff's got perfect control over her pale face, strong jaw, and hard brow, which give silent expression to every thought. She's also a generous actor, listening visibly to her scene partners. Together, Adams and Siff give us a woman who is cool, intelligent, and devoted to her work—she never forgets herself even during lovemaking. As an agent too, she's a consummate playwright, appraising her contact's motivation and assessing the holes in his plot like she's his dramaturg.

The only problem is, Adams' exuberance threatens to derail her own dramaturgy. She draws a comparison between the 1660s and 1960s, but stretches it too far sometimes and finally drops it altogether. The confusion of genres means director Wendy McClellan must switch tones abruptly, and she doesn't always finesse it. But the biggest problem is that Behn doesn't actually do much except write, leaving other characters to do her dirty work. Uncharacteristically, she dithers over betraying her contact, and the plot demands she must literally sacrifice her spycraft for her art. Anyhow, Adams' strength is her dialogue: she deploys subtext deftly, exploring the 17th-century fondness for double-meaning in a lyrically modern idiom.

Adams and Siff's vivacious Behn so dominates Or, that it's easy to forget the rest of the show. A pair of actors play a dozen extra roles, complete with quick-changes—Kelly Hutchinson's turn as Nell Gwynn, a sort of 17th-century Marianne Faithful, is especially delightful. The design elements cohere beautifully, with a set and costumes just sumptuous enough, their bright colors underscored by deft lighting and adding to the high spirit. Or, is a juicy, overstuffed delight, a rococo concoction of sex, spies, and stagecraft.

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Or, plays at the Women's Project (424 West 55th Street, betw. Ninth & Tenth Ave.), closing on December 13.

Americana Kamikaze (PS 122)

Americana Kamikaze
PS 122

October 28, 2009
Kenneth Collins
William Cusick (co-creators)

Americana Kamikaze (teaser) from Temporary Distortion on Vimeo.

I'm not into horror, mostly because I don't find fear too thrilling (mostly it's just stressful). But Temporary Distortion's Americana Kamikaze offers the sort of scare that I imagine others find in the genre. After a quick shock or two early on, this cutting-edge merger of stage acting and video drops the standard kit of scares. Instead, creators Kenneth Collins and William Cusick build a sort of dramatic hall of mirrors designed to unsettle the rational mind.

Collins and Cusick leave just enough traditional dramaturgy to keep the audience engaged. The plot's got several characters, and it does come to a climax. It sees a Japanese salaryman (Ryosuke Yamada) slowly losing his grip after having witnessed an uncanny attack by a succubus upon a couple in a subway station. But this straightforward description erases what's so cool about Kamikaze: its structure is shaped like an infinity sign.

The play cuts back and forth across time, and the characters relate dreams and urban legends, but there's no narrative signposts to help you orient yourself in the story. Yamada's unhinged everyman doesn't provide an anchor for the literal-minded either. He's got the draggy monotone of someone whose mind has been befogged by his glimpse of horror. Kamikaze is the dramatic equivalent of an MC Escher print: your mind can't find the point of focus.

It's not all great, even for those who like their horror cerebral and their theater hermetic. When the show breaks its sleek modern atmosphere—as it does in an ironic parody of a sad-sack karaoke song—its strength and focus ebb. And a subplot involving an American couple seems lifted from another genre altogether. But on the whole, Kamikaze is one seriously disturbing show, a 21st century haunted house for the avant-garde.

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Americana Kamikaze plays at PS 122 (150 First Avenue, betw. E. 9th & E. 10th St.), closing on November 14.