nytheatre Archive
Ice Factory 2003

WESTERN UNIDAD by Aaron Leichter
The operatic Western Unidad tries to retell old tales of America: of the journey to a land whose fertility is reflected in the diversity of its people, of a birthright that’s been stolen by the rich, of a community that must cooperate to survive. In these days of the sanctified Free Market, these stories need to be aired, because they’re a defense against the power that calls theft “business.” But sadly, Kristin Page Stuart and Matt Sherwin, the playwright/composers of Unidad, don’t tell their story well. This musical follows an ensemble of immigrants and poor whites near the Texas/Mexico border, scraping out an existence in the hard autumn of 1973. There’s an oil crisis, a criminal President, and a war overseas exacting its final price. Unidad gets the era’s tone right: like The Last Picture Show and Nashville, it shows a powerful culture crumbling under the weight of its ego. But unlike those ensemble pieces, Unidad is populated mainly by stereotypes: an innocent border-jumper, a practical farmer and her dumb white-trash lover, a Vietnam vet with nightmares, a bitchy queen. Only a Sam Shepard-style rodeo poet has the grandeur and mystery of a tall tale out of the Old West. The creative duo do manage to touch on modern politics, through the radio DJ at the local classical radio station who delivers surreal cornpone monologues about the OPEC oil embargo. There’s also a great song about a car that embodies the spirit of Mexico. Stuart and Sherwin seem pulled between strange ideas like these and an urge to tell a highly conventional story, and too often, the latter wins out. Despite a confusing first half, the audience can predict exactly how the story will end. The music doesn’t tap into the traditions that the rest of the play works with: there’s no sense of old tunes overheard. Unidad resembles the insular confusion of Masked and Anonymous (the recent film written by Bob Dylan), rather than a freeswinging populist lark like O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Although Stuart and Sherwin have mined the raw material, they haven’t refined that material into a coherent and revelatory American Myth.
FLOP by Jeff Lewonczyk
Like all the best clowns, you know exactly what they're all about the first moment you see them: Millie (Lee Etzold) is a gangly, awkward hostess, in a bright green dress that leaves her orange knickers showing, who badly wants her tea party to go smoothly; Snow (Nichole Canuso), decked head to toe in white fuzz, saunters onto the stage posing for a photo op; and Fleur Sauvage (Emmanuelle Delpech-Ramey), inevitably late, runs in like the wildcat she is, clawing the air in front of her and hissing at the audience. An odd threesome, to say the least, but they are the raison d'etre of Flop, the Philadelphia-based Pig Iron Theatre Company's entry to this year's Ice Factory festival. The skilled, precise performances by the ensemble are a thrill to watch. Whether they are trying in vain to activate an electric teapot that's too far from the outlet, searching for each other in the all-pink network of doors and hallways that constitutes the set, or playing variations on a toy trumpet, the three create a delightful chemistry even as they claim the spotlight for their own well-defined characters. This is nowhere more apparent than in an early scene in which Millie accidentally electrocutes herself and the others try to revive her. After several unsuccessful attempts, Snow gets the idea to turn back the hands on the clock, causing Millie to run backwards through her previous movements. Once this conceit is established time becomes malleable, and a tour de force of orchestrated sound and movement ensues as each character takes hold of the clock and manipulates it in her own distinct fashion. The temporal mischief, however, has consequences; their tomfoolery causes the cosmos some serious damage, and somehow it needs to be fixed. Unfortunately, it never really is. The piece ostensibly revolves around the trio's attempts to set the universe aright, but it's never fully apparent how they're accomplishing this. Clowning requires a system of rigorous logic, even if that logic only exists to be subverted. A form of logic exists within most of the individual bits, but on the larger level of the show the absurdities occasionally seem strained. When, for instance, Millie becomes involved in a conversation with an inarticulate gas mask, or Snow does a dance with an air pump, or Fleur Sauvage strangles herself with her own tail, it doesn't appear to be for any internal reason of character or situation, but only to set up a gag. With little of the action grounded in anything more than pure whimsy, I laughed less than I might have. Which isn't to say that I didn't laugh. The show contains many delicious moments which I won't spoil by revealing here. As a showcase for the talents of three very charming performers, Flop is a hoot. As a sustained exercise in absurdity, it's not exactly a flop (that would be too easy), but rather, something of a blip.
MOTHER'S LITTLE HELPER by Martin Denton
Ice Factory '03 gets off to a lively start with Lenora Champagne's one-woman performance piece, Mother's Little Helper. Part monologue, part rant, Mother's Little Helper is a meditation on motherhood and the state of the world: Champagne, who has a seven-year-old daughter, ponders the best way to prepare her child for a future that looks more and more perilous in this post-9/11, Bush-Ashcroft regime. Champagne, who is unfailingly smart and charismatic, is clad improbably in a 50s-style silk cocktail dress and oversized yellow fireman's boots, a living emblem of the odd juxtaposition of then and now that informs her life and her show. She ranges far and wide here, exploring questions as varied as the ever-diminishing resources available to American teenagers seeking information about abortion and birth control and the proper way to eat chocolate. She muses about her Cajun roots and upbringing, sprinkling delightful anecdotes about her own childhood in the Louisiana bayous in the late '50s and '60s. And she wonders, in pertinent contrast, how a little girl today, bombarded with images of Britney Spears and terrorist attacks on the nightly news, is supposed to retain anything resembling innocence. The show takes its title, by the way, from a fifty-year-old sex education manual that Champagne's mother obtained from the Catholic Church when it was time for Lenora to be taught the facts of life. The gist of that "Mother's Little Helper" was to shroud life's mysteries in ignorance; this one takes quite the opposite tack, building a solid case for education and awareness. Champagne manages to be both persuasive and entertaining, interspersing activist passages (delivered atop a makeshift soapbox) with genuinely funny jokes and comic monologues. The performance artist inside Champagne gets play as well: two baskets of sweet potatoes are used throughout as props (one yam is ingeniously morphed into a rat, for example), and there are gestural and dance interludes for those attuned to movement more than text. Will Champagne reach the audience that needs to hear her? Probably not, like a lot of downtown performance, Mother's Little Helper is mostly preaching to the converted. That doesn't diminish its importance, though; engaging an audience and making them think is as worthy an endeavor as I know of. And Lenora Champagne does it splendidly.
THE MYOPIA by Jeff Lewonczyk
David Greenspan prefaces his "Epic Burlesque of Tragic Proportions," The Myopia, with a prologue, equal parts Lewis Carroll and Gertrude Stein, about the fundamental differences between pictures and theatre (the gist being that a picture is an image of a thing that's already happened, whereas in the theatre the thing is actually happening). It's a heady brew, and there's no time to sip; if you want to come along you have to chug it all at once. But surrendering to it will leave you so intoxicated by Greenspan's richly effective blend of writing and acting that you'll walk around in a fizzy haze for hours. The show consists of Greenspan sitting in a chair and describing the show, which is otherwise unstageable. Or rather, three shows, each of which enjoys a symbiotic relationship with the others. One of these is a musical (without music or lyrics) about Warren G. Harding's failure to avoid being elected president. Another concerns the turbulent marriage between a fellow named Febis (who happens to be writing a musical about Warren G. Harding) and Koreen, a giantess with long Rapunzel hair. The third throughline (which self-consciously explodes after intermission) follows Barclay, a glowing orb, as he tries to write a play about Febis and Koreen. (There's actually a fourth show, of course, and that's the show we're watching, The Myopia.) It's not quite fair to call Greenspan the sole author and performer of the piece, because he has a legion of important, if unbilled, collaborators: the imaginations of the audience. Since he reads the stage directions as narration, the absurdly impossible production takes on a truer life in the minds of the viewers than it could ever have on a stage. (Sample direction: "Light illuminates Ohio.") Everyone who sees The Myopia creates it herself, right behind her own shortsighted eyes. Lest it sound no more than a book-on-tape performed live, let me stress the complexity of Greenspan's performance. The entire text is filtered through his uniquely stylized presence; he plays the characters, makes metatextual assertions in the guise of the Raconteur (inexplicably aided, at one point, by Carol Channing), and uses ornamental flourishes to add comedy and commentary to the lines. The humor of the piece sometimes has the randomness of lightning on a sunny day, but nothing ever feels arbitrary or forced. Form (of voice and gesture) is married to content (of words and images) in a way that could only feel so natural (albeit highly heightened) on the stage. All of which is a roundabout way of saying what was right in front of my face the whole time: I loved it. See it, if you can.
CONQUEST OF THE UNIVERSE by Martin Denton
The second entry in this year's Ice Factory is a work-in-progress revival of Charles Ludlam's early play Conquest of the Universe, directed by Emma Griffin and featuring a cast of 21. Conquest is a comedy of the broadest sort, retelling (sort of) the story of Marlowe's Tamburlaine in a campy, kitschy, over-the-top, in-your-face, nothing-is-sacred style. Ludlam borrows liberally from sources as varied as Hamlet, "B" sci-fi exploitation flicks, and TV commercials to make Conquest a brazen pop culture pastiche; he revels in scatology and profanity, making the work a direct descendant of Jarry's Ubu; and he saturates the script with gender-bending, cross-dressing, queer politicking. The result was genuinely subversive in 1967, but it feels only retro now, so much so that my principal reaction to the present revival is Why. Though Griffin has staged it with energetic anarchy, Conquest of the Universe, stripped of its power to shock now that its arsenal of theatre-of-cruelty weaponry has been appropriated by mainstream film and television, doesn't seem to have much point. The moral may be that each generation needs to write its own subversive theatre, which is why Ubu gets updated every time it gets revived. That said, the production has its strong points, notably a pair of go-for-broke performances by Clayton Dean Smith and Gibson Frazier as the King and Queen of Mars (Frazier also plays the Queen's twin brother, Cosroe), chief among the many enemies of the play's ostensible lead, Tamburlaine, President of Earth. Matthew Maher plays Tamburlaine with his customary skill and gusto, but except for a protracted comic bit involving the slaying of a whole bunch of babies, he hasn't got all that much to do. Griffin's direction is a sort of technical miracle of controlled chaos. It feels influenced by Sam Mendes, with members of the company loitering on the sidelines smoking cigarettes and talking on cellphones; I couldn't connect this concept to the text at all. The staging suffers badly from a decision to perform al fresco, for want of a better term, rather than with the rear stage wall that every other Ohio Theatre production I've ever seen has used. The big open loft-style space swallows about half of the words uttered by Griffin's actors, rendering much of Ludlam's script unintelligible.