‘Birds’ has lift
One of the most engrossing productions out there right now has to be The Three Birds by Joanna Laurens, currently playing at the GAle GAtes et al. gallery in DUMBO (NEST produces). The twenty-four-year-old UK playwright has already had it performed in London and appears poised to make continued waves in Germany and Hungary, where translations of the play are slated for premieres. Sam Gold (also twenty-four, for heaven’s sake) directs and keeps a taut line through this suspensefully constructed retelling of Ovid’s “Tereus”, about a man who lusts after and rapes his sister-in-law, then is avenged by his sister-in-law and wife with the murder of his son. This is one of those rare triumphs of collaboration where it becomes difficult to attribute the production’s power to a single artist: Is it actor Chime Day Serra’s tortured, inwardly-combusting approach to the lead character? Is it choreographer Leigh Garrett’s creation of a pressure-cooker atmosphere through her work with the chorus? Is it the three-leveled set designed by Andrew Lieberman, whose suspended rope net (from which the chorus moans its first lines before descending to the playing space) creates an early sense of entrapping fate? Is it the compellingly strange, often-graphic verse in which Ms. Laurens wrote the play? (Actually, I doubt it – I’ll explain why next week.) All elements merge into something uniquely powerful and seemingly possessed of a life of its own.
I have one or two significant reservations about The Three Birds, but I’ll save those for next week. There is enough of the exceptional in this production that it demands to be seen by anyone who wants to keep abreast of genuine developments in the theater.
But it’s still edgy, right?
(Quick disclaimer: I’m not a critic in the strict sense. The point of these postings is not to provide all the background about the lights, actors, etc. that a theatergoer will want to know in deciding whether to go to a show. It’s to comment on what’s happening in theater as a whole, and how a given production/play publishing reflects a trend, marks a breakthrough, or represents theatrical artistry at its best [or doesn’t!].)
Before and since starting work on a production of Uncle Vanya (outside of Handcart), I’ve been reading some critical material on Chekhov’s works. In Chekhov’s Plays, Richard Gilman makes the repeated point that an enduring strength of the plays is their freedom from the author’s own voice. Chekhov’s characters are full of platitudes, but the dramas they inhabit almost never indict or vindicate their points of view. The purpose of a Chekhov play is to show a season in the lives of its characters arriving and passing. What characters believe, whether they live boldly or cautiously, whether they are exciting and idealistic or tepid and pragmatic, is always secondary to the vision of shared humanity that is invoked. Anyone who has attended a top-notch production of Chekhov can attest to the wonderment and poignancy this suspended judgment met with genius can affect.
Not everyone needs to be Chekhov, but I find it impossible not to think of his work in contrast with my experience of Adam Rapp. I saw the latter’s Trueblinka near its close a few weeks ago, and found it numbingly coercive in the way it presents characters and circumstances. From the opening of the play, we are told exactly what to think about the Christian, middle American family that occupies it for a near three hours. In one scene, we see them crossing themselves at church; in the next, we see the matriarch mingling KKK-grade racial observations with shrill overseer tactics as she puts the younger children to work dusting off lily-white crucifixes. In one scene, we see the oldest, dim-bulbed son acting as Mama’s designated thug; we later learn that he was canned at the fire department for locking in the mixed-race residents of a burning house instead of saving them. In one scene, we see a distributor of Christian trinkets kindly buying up the family’s ceramic crucifixes; in the next, he’s trying to seduce their teenaged daughter.
Connecting these few dots, it doesn’t take long to get the point: Organized religion plus the Protestant work ethic plus simple-minded white trash equals dysfunction and violence. Besides being unoriginal and simplistic, this premise won’t sustain an entire play, especially one peopled by characters who serve only to enforce it. Hence the numerous bizarre and repulsive incidents that emerge every few scenes to keep an audience shocked and morbidly fascinated. Neither incest, nor scalping, nor graphic manifestations of puberty are given short shrift to inform us that, in case we’ve forgotten, this is one messed-up bunch of folks we’re looking in on.
Rapp aspires to poetry and manages a poetic veneer through certain intriguing images, such as the eldest son entering the house with a huge white cross on his shirtless back. But the effect of these images is always blatant and momentary. No metaphor of anything deeply rooted in the human experience is ever sustained.
I haven’t seen or read any of Rapp’s other plays. Trueblinka may not be representative of his best work. But it’s by no means atypical of this generation’s best playwrights to confuse sensation with boldness, victimhood with humanity, and social indignation with relevance. No wonder the straight play persists in having a negligible presence in this country’s cultural life.