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Peer Reviews Under Construction Reviewed by Sherry Deatrick Entire contents are copyright © 2009 Sherry Deatrick. All rights reserved.
And so it is out of this chaos, Charles L. Mee's Under Construction, the penultimate play in this year's Humana Festival, takes you on a magical mystery tour of American hipster culture from the 1950s to the present within the confines of the Victor Jory Theatre. Like one of William S. Burroughs' and Brion Gysin's cut-ups, this trip is probably one only the most adventurous theatergoer will appreciate. But for those willing to let go of traditional forms of entertainment, a true delight is in store. This is the kind of show that makes you glad to be alive, a rarity among the jumble of plays about darkness and dysfunctional families. Under harsh construction-style lighting, members of the multicultural SITI Company file onto the stage, a hard concrete floor. Tom Nelis (last seen here in Lee Blessing's Great Falls), with his pipe in his mouth and slicked-back hair, looks very much like the fictional Bob Dobbs (of the Church of the Subgenius). He tells the audience which scenes they will be performing (in seemingly random order) and says this is the order that is most "wonderful" to the company. But the sequence is not cast in stone. Later, other performers may want to add scenes or change them around, making the piece "like America, permanently under construction." While reading the script this afternoon, I had a hard time envisioning what was in store. Through the genius of director Anne Bogart, the playwright and the actors, those words on the page become a living organism. The piece constantly shifts focus, meandering through our shared history, picking out snippets and examining them for a moment, then moving on. First, a surrealistic 1950s Thanksgiving dinner is served on sawhorses, with paint buckets for chairs. 1950s classroom movies about fitting in with the crowd and going on a first date are enacted brilliantly, exaggerating the stiltedness of that era. The unreality of these Rockwell-esque ideals is lovingly mocked. The deeper you go on this journey, the less innocent these scenes become, however. This ersatz America turns ridiculously sinister as the women chant together, "I want what everyone else has. I want more than you have. I want what people don't know about." Fast forward to the present, where a hip young New Yorker is blogging about her crazy dream. As she speaks, actors walk across the stage like characters from a David Lynch film, wearing grotesque masks. We also see the seamy side of the 1950s in a beatnik coffee house, where Allen Ginsberg recites Howl and Charles Bukowski reads a poem from his later years (time and space are meaningless here). Pay attention to the listeners onstage instead of the poet, and you'll feel like you too are hearing these poems for the first time. In a bit of synchronicity, a scene from On the Waterfront, an Elia Kazan film is shown in one scene. As you may know, Kazan's granddaughter has a play in this year's festival. Another bit of irony is a scene in which the American family watches the film Perversion for Profit, financed by the infamous Charles Keating in 1965. The movie warns about the evils of pornography, which leads to aberrant sex acts. I wonder if Mee included this scene because he finds the film's relationship to Keating funny or strange. If so, the audience is left in the dark, and most people probably won't know that Keating was involved. I know only because I looked it up on the internet before going to see the play. This scene sticks out like a sore thumb and borders on becoming too "skittish." Or should I say, "skit-like?" In a very intense scene 49, called "Bad Stuff," a woman reads index cards of Jenny Holzer's pithy sayings (you remember, those red LED scrolling marquee signs from the 1980s) while the other actors perform odd masochistic rituals. A bulimic woman looks at herself in a mirror, then crumples in a horrified heap on the floor, gets up and repeats this in an endless loop. A man is duct-taped to a pole. And this is just the tip of the iceberg in this harrowingly realistic lunatic asylum. One of the more poignant scenes, called "I Remember," strikes a chord with all the baby boomers (like me) in the crowd. Childhood days are fondly recalled ("I remember Double Bubble gum comics, and licking off the sweet powder") ending with one of the women performing yoga-like ballet movements in silent prayer to soothing music. But the showstopper is the men's rendition of Frank Sinatra's "The Best is Yet to Come." The men, as baseball players wielding bats and other sports objects, make you truly understand what Sinatra means when he says "you ain't seen nothin' yet." Trust me, you don't want to miss this. Finally, the finale is an uplifting ode to the beauty of life, and the wonder in the world that will leave you feeling warm and toasty inside. What's great about the SITI Company is that all the actors are equal. There are no "stars." Each contributes to the whole, and they rely on and trust each other, as in most successful ensembles. Because of this intimacy, there are few (if any) flubbed lines. No one "steps on" another actor's lines. No one steals the scene. They are a cohesive, congenial group, and it shows. Don't miss your chance to see this avant garde theater company in action. The play's meaning, if there is one, can perhaps best be summed up by a quote from John Cage, as used in the piece: If I understand something So don't be upset if the play makes no sense to you. It will remain useful for years to come.
Actors Theatre of Louisville Featuring Akiko Aizawa, J. Ed Araiza, Leon Ingulsrud,
Ellen Lauren, Tom Nelis, Barney O'Hanlon, Makela
Spielman, Samuel Stricklen, Stephen Duff Webber.
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