Festival Season Round-Up: Part 2
Or, as one fellow critic announced after a grueling show: "Neil Simon, get behind me!"
Cultural Exchange Rate
Created by Tania El Khoury; presented by Fisher Center at Bard & The Invisible Dog Arts Center as part of Under the Radar
A tenderly built and theatrically ingenious new work.
Within the Invisible Dog Arts Center in Brooklyn, Lebanese artist Tania El Khoury has set up an L-shaped structure of lock boxes. After welcoming us serenely into the space, the audience guide, Nour Annan, explains how the show will work. Each of us receives a set of 10 keys, each set numbered in a different order. Separately we will go box-to-box, each tracing El Khoury’s investigation into her family’s history of migration in a different chronology.
That structural disorder proves apt, since generations of criss-crossing borders have left El Khoury’s family uncertain of its own tangled history. One lock box contains a literal puzzle that, once pieced together, shows a still-incomplete generational map. Other boxes reveal video interviews, old coin collections, dessert platters, locks of hair. Some boxes are intense sensory experiences, such as one containing pungent bars of the olive oil soap used by El Khoury’s grandmother.
Most moving is a video on El Khoury’s attempts to prove her family’s Mexican lineage – originally from Lebanon, her great-grandparents migrated to Mexico, where her grandfather was born, before later returning to Lebanon. Spotty record-keeping stymies El Khoury’s efforts, but alongside that frustration she recalls the kindness of a Mexico City official going above and beyond to help. There is no satisfying conclusion to the piece, but that’s by design. El Khoury’s search will continue. A family history is a vast, complicated thing, and there is always more to unlock.
Of the Nightingale I Envy the Fate
Created by Motus; presented by La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club as part of Under the Radar
Frequent Under the Radar guests Motus, an Italian performance collective specializing in genre-blurring riffs on classical texts, returns with a movement-based retelling of the myth of Cassandra. In Greek mythology, Cassandra is gifted the power of divine prophecy by Apollo, but cursed by that same god to see her warnings always disbelieved and unheeded. Of the Nightingale I Envy the Fate draws specifically on the reason for Apollo’s curse suggested by many Greek texts: that it came after Cassandra refused Apollo’s sexual advances.
As she enters, performer Stefania Tansini first chirps and squeaks like a caged bird, sweet, yet longing to be heard. A silver sheet runs down the middle of the space, with the audience seated on either side. Once thrown upon it, Tansini’s movements become wilder and more frenzied. As Cassandra is tossed around like a rag doll, blood pours from inside her. Grabbing at the wound, she spells out a single world across the sheet: “NO.”
Tansini’s physicality is visceral and shocking, and Nightingale starts out grippingly. But as the piece intensifies, its clarity ebbs. With the music (by R.Y.F.) pounding and pulsating, Cassandra tears apart the seams of her world and, eventually, her own body. It is unclear what this destruction precisely symbolizes, and what began as an immediate experience ends as an impressive but remote bit of spectacle.
Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” In Our Own Words
Created by Krymov Lab NYC; presented by BRIC as part of Under the Radar
Upon my arrival at BRIC, an usher instructed me to “select a child.” Behind her, an impressive array of child puppets filled the theater’s coat check, all of them makeshift creations pulled together from found materials. I selected Patrick, a freakish little thing with a paint roller for a hand.
Patrick didn’t do much except sit on my lap through Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” In Our Own Words, an antic and inventive new piece from Russian director Dmitry Krymov. (Following his exile from Russia for speaking out against the war in Ukraine, Krymov has formed Krymov Lab NYC and creates work with American performers.) But Krymov interrupts the action throughout with recorded voices of children declaring their boredom. Each time, the performers hurriedly push on to the next scene, promising to be more entertaining.
It’s a witty acknowledgement of the uphill battle Krymov must fight. For all his decades of acclaim in Russia, he must now essentially start over in New York. Whether his work can even travel is a question built into the structure of this very piece, which sees four actors attempting to retell Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin — a novel sometimes considered to be untranslatable. Yet even as he seeks to please his new audience, Krymov can’t help but poke fun. Must he now really degrade herself before a bunch of distractible, easily bored American children? Thanks a lot, Putin.
Those Moveable Pieces
Created by The Million Underscores; presented by The Exponential Festival at We Are Here
A duet created and performed by Timothy Scott and Nicolás Noreña for their company The Million Underscores, Those Moveable Pieces is the best kind of batshit festival insanity – a horny, confusing and ultimately transcendent dissection of our absurd human existence.
Scott and Noreña make clever use of Bushwick warehouse We Are Here, splitting the cold, unwelcoming space into three rooms. In the first, designed like a waiting room crossed with a porn studio, Noreña lies face first on the floor mumbling hopelessly while Scott gives him a pep talk (of sorts). We next follow them into an overfurnished living room, which the pair will proceed to rearrange into every possible configuration.
Finally we move into We Are Here’s central playing space, a vast and open room where the pair run in circles, prance down catwalks and cause general mayhem. The show concludes with an intimate pas de deux that feels somewhere between a slow dance and a dry hump.
Pieces is a deeply funny piece, particularly when playing on the desperate human need for aesthetic comforts. (Maybe if I place this object just so, or arrange this room just right, I won’t feel so sad?) But it is also profoundly erotic and centers, through all its absurdity, a charged, exciting connection between two bodies. I say bodies because they do not feel ultimately like people, but rather two pulsating collections of senses, overloaded by this crushing world and struggling towards that impossible something that feels just right. They won’t find it, but the dance goes on.
Chornobyldorf
Composed & directed by Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko; presented by PROTOTYPE at La Mama’s Ellen Stewart Theatre
Mostly impenetrable yet strangely hypnotizing, Chornobyldorf (subtitle: “an archaeological opera in seven novels”) is an epic work of dystopian modern opera. Ukrainian composers Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko imagine a barren and post-apocalyptic landscape where the few surviving humans attempt, through rudimentary instruments, half-functioning technology and a mangled cultural memory, to recreate the art and customs of a society long since lost to destruction.
Grygoriv and Razumeiko’s staging is bare and brutal, to the point where the audience feels almost unwelcome in the space. Musically, the show grows into an outright offense upon our senses, blaring punk-opera at decibels that sent several audience members hustling towards the exits. Yet throughout its two-hour-plus running time (without intermission), I was consistently entranced. For all its hostility, there is a humanity in Chornobyldorf, all the clanging, screaming howls driving at that most essential id — our basest and most primeval impulses, conjured in frightening musical form.
Rose: You Are What You Eat
Created by John Jarboe, in partnership with The Bearded Ladies Cabaret; presented by La MaMa as part of the Under the Radar
Early on in Rose: You Are What You Eat, writer/performer John Jarboe acknowledges that this might all feel a bit “cliche.” It seems an odd word to put on a musical about eating your own twin sister in the womb.
Years ago, when Jarboe came out to his aunt, she revealed that Jarboe had a previously unmentioned twin sister in the womb, declaring: “You ate her. That’s why you are the way you are.” This strange comment inspires Jarboe’s equally strange show, which begins as a mournful remembrance of “Rose” but shifts into an anarchic musical celebration of queerness, self-acceptance and “gender cannibalism.”
Jarboe is a likable host and has a killer voice, but the show’s ultimate landing point is a familiar (or, as Jarboe herself warned us, cliched) message of queer self-love. Given the enjoyable twisted starting-off point, that proves a bit of a letdown. The premise of Jarboe literally consuming a twin sister could open the door to a more complex consideration of how genderqueer and feminine identities both clash and intersect, but the show dodges deeper questions in favor of a more pat message of acceptance and love.