Olivia Jane Smith

Still from David Levine’s ‘Habit’ at Luminato, 2011, as seen on Galleristny.com

In an effort to write about more of the performances I see, I’m playing a new game called, “What can I say about this performance in 15 minutes?” On your mark, get set, go!

Tonight I watched David Levine’s “Habit” twice through, more or less. Which is to say I saw three people play out a thoughtful, muted kind of low rent soap opera. The circumstances—a love triangle involving two brothers, one of them a drug dealer, and a suicide-by-provocation—is the stuff of melodrama. The performances, thankfully, are anything but. It’s as if your neighbors led especially depressing and seedy lives and you couldn’t resist watching them through their windows for hours at a time (way better than TV!).

I found I couldn’t tear myself away after an initial viewing, wanting to see if things would play out differently the second time around. While the main action stayed true to form, the differences were in the details. Viv (Eliza Baldi)—the doomed dirty blonde love object of sensitive songwriter Mitchell (Brian Bickerstaff) and plaything of his brother, small town drug kingpin Doug (Ben Mehl)—changed from sympath to mean girl when she explained to Mitchell that the poem he’s so proud to have published was part of a scam to get him to shell out money for printing costs. Mitchell is numb the first time he is videoed by Viv for her semiotics class, answering her questions about his admittedly sorry circumstances in life (he’s just been fired from a job at Wal-Mart). The second time, he is in tears. Everyone snorts more pretend Coke the second time through. The conceit of Viv taking “real life” videos for her college course is a delicious meta-theatrical joke. At one point she admonishes Doug for playing to the camera: “You’re performing!” she sneers.

Clinging to the opening where a sliding glass patio door might have been, angling for a better view (the play is staged inside a drywall home set up inside the Essex Street Market, and we peer at it through openings where the windows would be), I found myself wanting to step into the scene with the actors. And when the show was over, I got to. I ran into my friend Tom Sellar, whose partner, Gideon, is among the show’s producers (though anyone would have felt free to wander in once the power was cut and the show ended, mid-scene, to enthusiastic cheers and applause). Ben Mehl told us about the brownies Brian had made “onstage” (at his pretend home) during the show. While Mehl loved doing the show, he said he was glad it was over now. (The actors are onstage nonstop for eight hours at a time, just like an office work day, as Tom pointed out.) Later I heard him tell writer and director Levine that the performers knew that in whatever direction they tugged the narrative, they’d find a way to make it work.

(So that was more like 45 minutes, but I also got a phone call from my mom, answered a text from my brother, and bought a plane ticket. Not bad for late Sunday night!)

Tonight I saw Sarah Ruhl’s “Melancholy Play.” Not surprisingly, it made me a little wistful. Once you see this warm, funny, incandescent appreciation of an oft-spurned emotion (in an enchanting production at The Invisible Dog, in Carroll Gardens), you get the little joke 13P and Ruhl are playing. How more fitting to end this experiment in theater-making, which has become so beloved over the course of many years and shows, than with a play celebrating the bittersweet.

Endings are mentioned specifically in the course of the play as a frequent source of the sensibility from which it takes its title. And the play’s ending—in which its characters aren’t quite sure what they are anymore, but know that they’re together, and that that’s enough—also speaks of transformation, the phase 13P is now undergoing as it “implodes.”

Of course unlike the characters, the 13 playwrights won’t be together anymore, at least not as 13P. But transformed, they may be, by this experience of a new way of producing work. Their writings have surely felt transformative to those of us lucky enough to have seen some of these remarkable plays.

I felt incredibly honored to get to do a brief interview with Ms. Ruhl, via email. 

… and the first annual Obie Awards for yours truly. The best part of the night was seeing people in the balcony throw their hands in the air and cheer like they were on the 50-yard line as team theater scored touchdown after touchdown. The winners also said some great things in their speeches. This doesn’t begin to provide enough context or do them or their accomplishments justice, but here are a few things that caught my ear nonetheless (and in no particular order, other than where I managed to scribble them down in my program): 

Susan Pourfar, of “Tribes” (above), on reading plays at home in high school and wondering, “How can I meet these people who are so articulate and smart and sexy? And now I get to meet them. They’re all here in this play.”

Lifetime Achievement Award winner, playwright Caridad Svish: “Theater begs ascension while reminding you to keep your ear to the ground and the beauty and the dirt.”

Gabriel Ebert, on collaborating with Marie Louise Wilson and Amy Herzog, among others, in “4000 Miles”: “Thanks for letting me be the lone, strange guy.”

Jim Fletcher, who won for “sustained excellence” for his work with Elevator Repair Service and the New York City Players: “Theater is about getting your ass in the room… . You did that, you got your ass in the room,” which prompted my theater-going but non-theater-making friend (see her lovely mug at the end of this post) to say “Gatz gave a shout-out to me!” He added of the collaborative process of making theater that in fact, just showing up, “It’s never enough. Something else from somewhere else comes along, and it’s enough.”

Steven Boyer, of “Hand to God,” of working at Ensemble Studio Theater: “I found a home and a sandbox to play in.”

The Debate Society, which won a $2500 grant: “Thank you to anyone who ever bought something at one of our benefit stoop sales.”

Linda Lavin, after bringing the chatty, exuberant audience to a hush: “I’m not silent so that you will be. I just want to be in the moment right now.” And on the dream of to “act and tell stories,” which she kept doing through career lulls, working for years without an agent: “It’s attained and it’s lost and it’s regained and it’s lost.” After calling herself “the oldest person in the room” and remarking on the abundance of youthful energy, she invited everyone to come to a show at the Red Barn Theater, in North Carolina, which she now calls home.

John Collins, on the Elevator Repair Service’s first Obie, for Sustained Excellence: “It was a tough 20 years in coming.”

Presenter Eric McCormack: “‘Hip threads,’ that’s what it says here [in my script]. Welcome to the Obies, 1972.”

Richard Maxwell, as read by his wife, in a letter: “Thank you to Eugene O’Neill for letting me not have to worry about the writing for once.”

Michael Feingold, on taking a moment to remember theater artists who have passed away this year: “No matter how much you reinvent yourself, you wouldn’t have a present without a past.”

Above, presenters Hugh Dancy and Leslie Odom Jr. They kept their introductory remarks to a minimum, but it was nice to see them both.

Self-portrait with fire extinguisher: Me (on the left) and my sister-in-law and frequent theater buddy Katherine, in the glamorous subterranean powder room at Webster Hall.

Among the evening’s other adventures, I donated a plastic bag to one of the members of Ethan Lipton’s orchestra, which won for “No Place to Go,” so his Obie wouldn’t get wet. The rain started up again while we were in Webster Hall, but inside, it was a beautiful evening.

There is a lot of good material here. If You are in an open field 2.0 comes out, this time with a stronger arc, the Neo-Futurists might have something. As the show itself says, “Reboot, rethink, rename, reclaim—reboot!”

“You are in an open field” plays through May 19 at HERE Performing Arts Center.

Disclaimer: This was my first exposure to the New York Neo-Futurists. I’m told their shows don’t have plots. I stand by my opinion that this show needed, if not a traditional narrative, a clearer build. I’ll look forward to seeing more of their shows in the future.

Above, Scott Shepherd and the cast of GATZ. Photo by Joan Marcus via BroadwayWorld.com.

One of the primal pleasures of reading a novel—and one reason for the persistent letdowns of film versions—is seeing the story come to life visually inside your head. I think it’s one of the not-so-secret secrets behind the success of GATZ. This rendition of “The Great Gatsby”—every word of it—from the Elevator Repair Service, gives new meaning to the term “staged reading.” It is about to wrap up another successful run at the Public Theater before bringing this version of a great American novel to British shores.

The show’s initial run at the Public in 2010  saw Ben Brantley at the New York Times pronounce it one of the top theatrical events of the last decade. That is a lot to live up to, for any show, and the sold-out run, the pricey tickets (not really pricey at all when you consider all the hours of theater you are getting for the cost of admission), and its epic magnitude—what could possibly be so good that you’d want to sit tight for six whole hours of it?—creates a towering heap of expectations, so much so that even a show worth all that could buckle under the weight by the time we (meaning, me) finally get around to seeing it.

I missed it last year, but, thanking the theater gods for a second chance, I was determined not to miss it again. I got some help in this regard (not for the first time) from my wonderful next-door neighbor, who works at The Public (I lucked out in ways I could not have foreseen with my current apartment). So there I was on one of the first deliriously nice days of spring, heading into a dark room to hear and see the American fairy tale known as “The Great Gatsby.”

Back to where I started: GATZ, for anyone who hasn’t seen it (go, go, go!), is set in a contemporary office of the ramshackle, drab species (as opposed to the gleaming, slick variety). At first this can be perplexing. At times it’s distracting. And then, suddenly, it’s magical.

The conceit defies logical sense. The idea is that someone’s computer is stubbornly refusing to show up for work. So, looking for anything with which to occupy himself, he (Scott Shepherd, whose performance is a marvel) picks up a copy of The Great Gatsby stashed at his desk and begins reading, out loud, at first without leaving his chair. The open office also contains a couch, another desk, a lone window that looks not onto the great outdoors but into a corridor that leads, presumably, to other companies’ equally shabby offices. Other co-workers wander in and out, sometimes acknowledging the reader with “what’s up with him?” glances and other times seemingly tuning him out.

There are fairly long periods during which we’re simply being read to, a hushed room full of children at bedtime. There are other moments when people come with papers for our reader to shuffle through, his office job intruding on our story, the two disparate worlds juxtaposed in ways that don’t seem to add any new layers of meaning to either (there are other times when they intersect quite cleverly).

But the show’s real coup de theatre capitalizes on part of what is so delicious about reading: As the words jump off the page and swirl around to form dazzling visual scenes that exist only in our imaginations, the office and its inhabitants become Gatsby’s glamour-drenched garden party; Nick gazing out over Long Island sound; Nick and Jordan’s carriage ride through Central Park on a summer night; an uncomfortably intimate impromptu party in a suite at the Plaza.

It’s not that the show unfolds only inside our heads, of course. We’re all there together, seeing the same actors inhabiting the same office set. But our imaginations somehow fill in the rest. More so than in more literal theater productions, one senses this is an experience both shared and also ours alone.

We never leave the office—and yet, just as we never leave our couch or beach chair or subway seat when reading a novel, we do. There are costumes—Daisy’s simple long white dress, Gatsby’s pink suit—but nothing close to what we’ll see in the upcoming film remake. Nothing realistically period or glitzy. No green vistas or mansions lit up like birthday cakes except the ones in our heads, shimmering in the air with each word Nick utters. The excellent lighting design is the biggest material contributor (if one can call light “material”) to the changes in setting and mood that feel so palpable.

The first time we see Gatsby come to life on stage, if memory serves, he is looking across his dark lawn toward East Egg and Daisy. Actually, he’s perched in a doorway leading from the office to the corridor. But thanks in part to the shadowy office and glow from the hallway, we can feel the salty night air, and see the dew on the grass and the water spread like a dark carpet toward the lights twinkling on the far shore.

Photo by Chie Morita for Metro.

Let me tell you about a place I visited a few weeks back. It was billed as all-but-abandoned. For a ghost town, it turned out to be a pretty happening spot.

The overwhelming drawback to “Centralia,” an Ugly Rhino production which ran back in March at the Brooklyn Lyceum, was its overpopulation. Centralia is a real-life Pennsylvania coal town, which at its peak boasted around 2761 residents (according to the show’s program). In 1962, a subterranean blaze spread through the mines, heating the earth from the inside-out and wreaking environmental havoc, including clouds of vapor that seeped up out of the ground.Most residents fled, but a few—including conspiracy theorists, the town’s mayor, and the stubbornly rooted—stayed put. Today the town is home to a population of two.

On a Saturday night in Brooklyn, however, its ranks can (and did) easily swell to 100 or so. Ugly Rhino took over the Lyceum’s top floor and tented off portions in order to recreate the domiciles of five stalwart Centralian families; Mayor Rea (Matthew Wise) and his wife (Kelsey Landon)—his take on the local situation gives new meaning to the expression “fire and brimstone”; Karen (Manini Gupta) and Amy (Anna Perczak), two twenty-something sisters, one of whom is determined to catch a husband—quite a trick in a town with only nine people in it; Nevin Porter (Michael Bernstein), who wandered into town and stayed to examine the science behind what’s percolating under the ground; Aaron (Dylan Kammerer) and Jed (Douglas Scarf), who run a kind of town museum, preserving what is left despite misgivings, both about the worth of their enterprise and the curiosity-seekers it brings to their doorstep; and lastly Evelyn (Leah Loftin), a fantasist whose yearnings finally sprout into wings. At the beginning of the evening, we’re greeted and given a sort of orientation to the town by a bartender from a neighboring burgh, Miss Trish (Sarah Hartley). Being a professional booze-pusher, she also gives us a drink, since cocktails, one for each room, are a defining part of our time in Centralia. Apparently being under the influence is an unofficial requirement for entry (as well as a great selling point with audiences, judging by the show’s turnout and the lines at the bar).

As Evelyn, Leah Loftin’s performance was the highlight of a visit to Centralia. It’s as if the blazes beneath the town have ignited a fire in her; her Evelyn glows with their feverish light. Of all the personages we meet here, Evelyn is at once larger-than-life and true to it. We can believe that this woman, a little like a tragicomic heroine out of Tennessee Williams (she’s an actress, what else), could fill the town’s void with her self-aggrandizing day dreams. When her overblown fantasies of stardom finally inspire her escape, it feels like a triumph, and a fitting climax to the event. What happens when she gets to the other side hardly matters. (It should be said that Miss Loftin is a friend, one who’s work I’ve had the pleasure of writing on before, in New Orleans, where we first became acquaintances.)

It’s hard to conjure desolation when you’re surrounded by dozens of chatty, cocktail-swilling Brooklynites. Worst is that the noise-level breaches the homes of our few and proud Centralians, since their walls are actually curtains, and even those stop far short of the lofty rafters of the Lyceum. The din was so intense the night I attended that it was hard to hear many of the actors, despite the living room set-ups, which mean that typically only a few feet separates audience and performer (if that).

The noise, and the drinks, which had names like Toxic Tonic and Stockpile Punch, may have served a greater purpose; they distracted us from the script, which didn’t delve very deeply into what might really cause someone to stay in a place scarred from within. Still, it was an ambitious attempt at event-scale theater, and judging from both its success and that of the most prominent current example of the style—“Sleep No More”—there’s a hefty appetite among theater audiences for leaving your seat and roaming with the locals, be they Centralians or murdering film-noir Scots. If “Centralia” had been done at a venue like The Old School, where I saw “Too Shy to Stare” back in January, and whose layout is better suited to a show like this, it could have been far more successful. That, plus a more thoughtful script, might be worth a repeat trip.

Kate Valk in ‘Brace Up!’ (photo by Mary Gearhart)

Though it pains me to admit it, there are times when the thrills of the Wooster Group have eluded me. When I think back now on productions like “The Hairy Ape,” the more recent “Hamlet,” and several other pieces, I would like to think there were moments that captivated and astonished me (I’m sure there were). I just can’t remember them amid the noisy barrage of theater-as-expected being ripped apart.

So their current production at St. Ann’s Warehouse, of what are referred to as Eugene O’Neill’s Glencairn, or “sea” plays, is startling in its quietness. Directed by Richard Maxwell in a collaboration with his New York City Players, “Early Plays,” as the show is billed, is a study in blunt impact, all the more brutal for being unsparingly direct. The effect is of throwing back a shot of whiskey and being punched in the jaw. The next morning, you won’t need aspirin or a slab of raw meat to take down the swelling, but you will still feel the pain of these characters’ harsh, hopeless lives.

I saw Brian Mendes in a production this past fall of Adam Rapp’s “Animals & Plants,” (part of The Amoralists’ “Hotel/Motel” double bill) and was stuck by his ability to seem simultaneously present and of another world. Here uses this same quality to great effect as Yank, a seaman not long for this life. His deathbed yearnings for the solace of connection, when he shares with his best friend his dream of their cultivating a farm together, are nothing short of heartbreaking. Maxwell creates the compressed feeling of a ship’s barracks by staging the scene back in the far corner of the stage, hemmed in by darkness, so that mostly what we see is Mendes’ face illuminated as if by a lantern. It’s like we were watching the whole scene through a window, immediate and far away at the same time. The main stage area is covered with glowering fog, and figures on the deck of the ship move through it as if already ascending heavenward, or descending into hell.

A few days after my voyage into O’Neill’s bitter seas I had another encounter with the Wooster Group, thanks to Anthology Film Archives’ film and video series of a impressive selection of their work. On a drizzly Saturday evening I attended a screening of “Brace Up!”, the troupe’s 2003 take on Chekhov’s “Three Sisters.” The video quality, when stretched to fill a big screen, was grainy, and the back wall of the stage—along which performers seem to be preparing for some variety of Japanese theater performance—was a wash. But the video had at least one distinct advantage, I would think, over watching the piece live: actors’ faces, shown via live video on small TV monitors during the actual performance, were pulled out and rendered larger in the film, giving us a better look at cinematic, extreme close-ups of their wonderfully alive, expressive faces as they intone Chekhov’s words. These little portraits—particularly of Sheena See as Olga and Anna Kohler as interloping in-law Natalya—are at once sincere and a little soapy, teasing the strands of melodrama out of Chekhov’s story of being stuck in the sticks.

“Brace Up!” had a number of charmingly offhand dance sequences not unlike the kind we expect from “Elevator Repair Service” (who was inspired by whom, I wonder, since this was the first time I’d seen the Wooster Group bust a move in this fashion). Overall the piece was more overtly playful and buoyant than I’ve come to expect from The Wooster Group, as if Olga, Masha, and Irina were—as the title “Brace Up!” implies—determined to keep on dancing, whether there is anyone around who truly appreciates it or not. Kate Valk is credited with the choreography, which only makes me like her even more. In both “Brace Up!” and “Early Plays,” her presence is arresting, every line she speaks quietly commanding our attention as if it had come from some deep place most of us can’t get to. Whether she’s spitting out a retort as a denizen of a baleful Irish pub or pining in an armchair as the unlucky-in-love Masha, she’s a case study for the acting adage that a character should have a secret. We don’t need to know what it is; watching Valk is an answer in itself.

“This way for our studio tour—you! You look like you have something important you want to say,” he coaxed me, in reaction to some facial expression I was unaware of having made. I was, in fact, a little baffled at being whisked into the Gob Squad’s “studio tour”—and so cheerily, at that—immediately upon entering the Newman Theater space at The Public this past Monday night. And he (he being Simon, one of the performers) was right: There were several unspoken questions that sprang to mind (though my lips remained sealed). Was this “studio tour” part of the performance? (Answer: Yes, sort of.) Did everyone in the audience go on the “studio tour”? (Answer: Yes, though I’m sure no one was forced, so if you ran in the other direction at their sunny invitation, you could likely escape.)

Hopefully there were few escapees, since it would be a shame to have missed this prelude. Almost the entire show took place with the performers behind screens that separated the “studio” from the audience. For the rest of the evening, we watched them and their goings-on projected live on video. So the studio tour pulled back the veil, letting us see how the whole operation worked before it began in earnest.

You might think this would demystify the performance, but instead it highlighted the power of the camera to transform and heighten, to somehow mystify and reveal at the same time. Talented and charming as the Gob Squadders are, it’s hard to imagine that the antics they pursue in their mundane, brightly lit “studio”—furnished with a cheap kitchen table, a mattress, a squashed-looking couch, all of which would likely have been at home in Warhol’s Factory—would have been quite so fascinating if they weren’t on film.

Which, I imagine—knowing next to nothing about the films of Andy Warhol—was his point in making the movies that serve as inspiration for this show, entitled “Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good). Take anything; film it; it takes on a new life, transformed by the camera into something larger and more otherworldly than its flesh-and-blood self.

Another question I had in my mind when I encountered the flesh-and-blood Simon ushering me into “the studio” set up on stage, was, is this being filmed? I don’t know the answer, but it’s probably yes; because later in the evening, several audience members became stars of the show. The studio tour may have been our collective “screen test.”

The audience participation aspect of the performance steals the show, and that is likely the intention. Of course, the Gob Squad makes the orchestration of all this look as natural as rolling off a mattress on the floor, pouring some vodka and lighting a cigarette. They manage to put their audience recruits so at ease that they feel comfortable kissing strangers (okay, maybe not that comfortable, but that is part of the delight for both spectators and kissers, or so we’d guess). Another audience member (a guy) poses, cheesecake-style, on the kitchen table, and a woman who admits to the entire audience (reluctantly) that she is 53 becomes a glowing, wide-eyed angel of the screen. Their “performances” are so seamless it’s tempting to think they are plants, but they also show the kind of genuine astonishment at being thrust onstage that is impossible to fake. I ask the guy after the show, just to make sure, and when he assures me he was just a dude in the opening-night crowd, I tell him he has a new career as a performer. “That’s what everyone keeps saying!” he says. A star is born—for 15 minutes, at least.

In pondering why the God Squad chose to mine Warhol’s films now, reality TV comes to mind (talk about the camera transforming the mundane into something people are clamoring to watch!). And as in reality TV, the Gob Squad performers veer from mesmerizing to dull as they stare into cameras, try to sleep, eat spoonfuls of mustard, try to have sex—all similar stuff to what Warhol had people do in front of a camera in his movies.

Simon, the charismatic narrator/ringleader of the evening, says something to the effect of, this moment was the crucible of modern culture, the moment we look back on and say, it all happened right then! Of course, doesn’t every generation of artists think exactly that about the one that came before? It’s like Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris”: Gertrude Stein and Picasso aren’t good enough for Marion Cotillard’s character—she pines for the days of Toulouse-Lautrec.

I personally have never wished I was a denizen of Warhol’s Factory—I associate it with too much black eyeliner and too many cigarettes. The tribe of artists I would most like to join is still around: Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal (more on that in another post, I hope!). The Gob Squad, on the other hand, as opposed to the Warholians they’re emulating, look like they would be fun to hang out with, and they brought a sense of lightness to their highly entertaining “Kitchen” that I wouldn’t have expected. Here’s hoping their fame lasts more than those 15 minutes we’re all supposed to get.