Manual Cinema performs Ada/Ava Friday–Sunday, March 16–18, 2018 in the Zellerbach Playhouse. (Photo credit: Yi Zhao)
Chicago’s audacious theater company Manual Cinema has brought its hour of magic to Berkeley just past the ides of March this year, and if you have a theatrical bone in your body, you owe it to yourself to hie thee thither posthaste ere its pixie dust evaporates away into the memories of its enthusiasts.
The form Manual Cinema has created is as simple as it is imaginative: a hybrid of simple animation, Balinese shadow puppet play and live performance (including sound effects and music), using two screens and four overhead projectors, much like those many of us have all suffered through in high school classrooms and musty lecture halls, but with imagination and heart attached, like the balloon that haunts the show throughout.
The live performances make each performance unique and provide the same tension one feels watching a high-wire act: of course they won’t fall, but what if they do?
The story is of an admirable simplicity and originality: two ageing sisters, Ada and Ava—identical twins, as an array of old-fashioned oval-framed silhouettes adorning the walls of their home let us know in no uncertain terms—keep a lighthouse on a stormy coast, and one of them dies (no spoiler here, as the death occurs in the very opening).
The remaining sister has not only lost her oldest and closest companion, but in a sense has also lost her other self, and the rest of the story is what happens to her in her long journey to try to rejoin her sister, through memories of their growing up together, dream and nightmare, an unfinished chess game, and the haunting presence of a tall pier mirror that taunts the surviving sister with the image of her dead twin, which is, of course, her own.
We are told the story in a series of acetate and paper projections, thrown against a small screen at the back of the stage, as the performers work the models in full view of the audience onstage, with their backs to us.
The performers portraying the two sisters act out their scenes in front of that first screen. The shadows on the screen are then thrown onto a considerably larger one hanging high above the stage, and in mirror-reverse from the action seen on the first. That second screen, combining the projected images into one commanding image is what rivets the audience’s attention from first to last, though one can, at any moment, glance down to watch the “kitchen” where the febrile stew is being concocted.
The strongly convincing performers included Vanessa Valliere as Ada and Kara Davidson as Ava, as well as puppeteers Dru Dir (who directed and first explored the ideas that eventuated in the show), Sam Deutsch and Charlotte Long. The musicians, whose music subtly shaped the show’s emotional cast, were Michael Hilger, Kyle Verger and Quinn Tsan, who also performed the colorful and clever sound effects.
One thing about the names: one might be forgiven for thinking of the heroine of Vladimir Nabokov’s longest novel for “Ada,” or Ava Gardner for her twin. One might also think of “avian” for Ava, as in at least one scene, a bird appears above Ava’s grave. And of course, there are only two letters to add or change to go from either Ava or Ada to “alma,” the soul.
The show’s only weakness is its conclusion, where the authors are clearly unable to figure out how to end their story. The story’s logic sternly leads in one direction only, but they can’t quite muster the courage to go there, and so equivocate, sweetly enough if not entirely convincingly. But forgivably.
To say too much would be to spoil a show of such fine delicacy of spirit and subtle strength. Leave it at this: stormy nights and threatening seas, beautiful dreams and fearful nightmares, gaiety and deviltry, mischievous teapots and nagging clocks (one of them advertising the “Menaechmi Bros.”—from the Roman Plautus’s comedy about twins), fights between the sisters and a near drowning, a visit to a carnival and a visit to the regions of death, chess games and halls of mirrors, a lost balloon and a forever kept shell, skeletons and graveyards and spiral staircases, and the looming light of the lighthouse, twisting like an owl’s eye and forever threatening to go out for good, and the mystery of who one is, and the mystery of death, and the mystery of reconciling ourselves to the mysteries of life.
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Christopher Bernard is co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His novel Voyage to a Phantom City came out in 2016; his second collection of poetry, Chien Lunatique, came out in 2017. His new novel (currently being serialized in Synchronized Chaos) will appear later this year.
Christopher Bernard’s “AMOR i KAOS”: Seventh Installment
It could be a lifetime. Between the screed and the admonition, the command and the oath. Your followers lined up like soldiers on a ridge gazing down at the ignorant city. The horses neighing as they slip on rocks wet with dew. The dawn treacherously beautiful and cool, as if carrying, clutched in its hand, the message that will never reach them. Stop. Do not attack. We have surrendered, the war is over. And they descend, silent, to a pointless destruction. It could be like that. Or it might be briefer, a sojourn over a weekend or no longer than a summer of one’s youth. Remember that? It feels like yesterday. But it was a lifetime ago. It might be a gentler doom, more quiet, discreet, causing damage to only two people, bruised and aching and left for dead on the indifferent battlefield of love, cruelest of tyrants, your gauntlets bloody, your banners torn and fluttering in the dust-filled wind.
xxxxx
He closed the book and gazed at her gravely.
—I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, she said. You hopeless romantic!
His mouth smiled. Which looked strange since his eyes were so bleak.
Isa Musni in Mugwumpin’s “Moon Disaster.” Photo by Battista Remati.
SWEET LUNACY
In Event of Moon Disaster
Mugwumpin
At Z Below
San Francisco
Through January 28, 2018
A review by Christopher Bernard
The latest thought-provoking work by Mugwumpin, the award-winning theatrical group based in San Francisco, is inspired by one of the most dramatic what-if moments of the 1960s—a decade in no need of more drama than it was already cursed with. What if humanity’s first journey to a world beyond earth had ended tragically? What if Apollo XI’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had never made it home from the surface of the moon in that fateful summer of 1969?
Anyone alive at the time, who was both conscious and near a radio or TV, knew that such a disaster was an entirely realistic possibility. It took little imagination to conceive of a plethora of accidents, miscalculations, technical glitches, system bugs, slip-ups, oversights, results of ignorance, and even acts of sabotage, that would have made the moon landing a disaster of historic proportions, and one that would have been seen by much of mankind at exactly the same time.
(Ahem. I realize there are still some who believe that the moon landing was a hoax; if you are reading this, you may leave now. Otherwise, you may find the following prose causes fits, seizures, repressed memories, and a gagging sensation that makes you stop breathing altogether.)
It wasn’t generally known, until revealed some thirty years afterward, that a speech had been written (by William Safire, later a well-known conservative columnist, public intellectual and talking head) for the president to give in case, for whatever reason, the first moon landing ended in catastrophe. The speech (the original of which is in the National Archives) has been published; indeed, a facsimile copy of the typescript, including chilling ancillary material, is included with the performance’s program.
And based on ideas generated by this gruesome “perhaps,” Mugwumpin has created one of its ever-intriguing “devised theater” pieces, based on two years of research and group work, script writing, improvisation, exploration in words, dance, music, costume, and video projection. The often fascinating, if not entirely satisfactory, results are on display at Z Below (at Project Artaud) in San Francisco. It is something that anyone curious about the vanguard of contemporary theater owes it to themselves to see.
As usual with Mugwumpin, the audience (limited to 35 members per performance) is required to perform some participatory antics, though nothing as elaborate as in some of Mugwumpin’s most spectacularly successful pieces (such as that wondrous theatrical machine and fantasy generator, performed in the ghostly labyrinth of San Francisco’s Old Mint, “Future Motive Power,” which first introduced to me to this company’s learned, deeply thoughtful, audaciously inventive, and lucidly ludic imagination).
Upon receiving your ticket, you are handed a small plastic ball, a little moon of your own, to pocket like your own satellite, which you are welcome to drop in a bucket, leave by your seat, flick at a performer if you’re feeling especially ludic, or take home with you afterwards (as I did; it is now being played with, as any moon should be, by our youngest cat).
The performance begins in the lobby, where the performers, most of whom appear in (to use my companion’s term) space drag, based on a kind of “retro-futurism”—a return to the starry-eyed optimism of the space program of that rapidly vanishing era— launch our journey to the far-side of a never-to-be-completely-known moon through video and computer projections of a fantasy astronaut crew, half male, half female (which is only fair, though to this day there are far fewer female than male astronauts), caught in a sci-fi spacetime warp where disaster’s shadow looms. We are all astronauts now: the lobby is our decompressive airlock before we are allowed out-in to the inner-outer space of the liminal universe of their/our imagination.
And in, out, around, and away we go.
(One of the show’s most interesting aspects needs to be mentioned here: it’s play throughout on such words and concepts, as used in the world-outside-the-world that is the universe outside earth, as “up,” “down,” “in,” “out,” “around,” “on,” “free,” “lost” (as in “Am I free? Or am I lost? Is there a difference?”) There is even an informative lecture on how space professionals refer to visiting another planet: for example, one goes “in” to the moon when landing upon it, “out” from it when leaving it, “around” it when orbiting it. “Up,” “down,” “above,” “below,” even “right” and “left,” are, one imagines, too relative to the speaker’s physical position in the weightlessness of space to have much meaning. At some point, no doubt, we will have to create an arbitrary but universally agreed on standard of coordinates for the universe as a whole, just as we have for earth, so we can decide, and understand, where we are.)
Once inside the small “black box” theater at Z Below, we were lined up on a narrow stage-like margin, a bit as in a very long police lineup, and watched, in the staging area below, a dance of the astronauts, in orbits within orbits, depicting the moon orbiting the earth, and the earth orbiting the sun, to quiet music performed by Erin Mei-Ling Stuart, who provides much of the show’s music and also plays the embodiment of the myth and magic, the witch, of the moon.
Soon after, a mob of small stools was dragged into the central area and we were invited to settle ourselves on them, helter-skelter, and the rest of the performance was performed, for the most part, on the narrow surround stage and projected against the walls around us.
The show intertwines several story lines. One is of two astronauts on the moon, who babble to each other in the hapless doublespeak of technological abstraction so advanced as to seem to have no meaning at all (the astronauts sometimes sound like robots trying to sound like human beings, which may be a theatrical mistake, as it deprives them of some of the humanity we as an audience need to be feel to fully identify with them). The two astronauts lose communication with earth and, as they face the likelihood of catastrophe, provide the show’s central drama. This story line is enriched by the most imaginative uses of theatrical space in the show, in particular, in the latter half, a spectral use of scrim and distantly lit heads of the astronauts in their peculiarly vulnerable-looking helmets against a wall of absolute darkness.
Another story is about Mimi, a young Latina who loves science and wants to become an astronaut, but also has a social conscience, and must decide which to follow: her deepest heart’s desire to explore space, or another desire, hardly less deep, to improve the lives of her people; of all people, suffering, fraught and foolish humanity, on earth.
Yet another story is of the Moon herself and her appearances throughout human history as a source of myth, magic, and romance; a nightly visible goddess who is made known at first only as song, dance, and story, finally to appear as a voiceless dancer with an immense balloon-like head, a figure of both gentle humor and deep mystery.
What results is a fascinating theatrical fantasy that only occasionally gets snagged in new-agey shallows and preachiness (though it has the good sense to poke fun at its inevitable californitis). Though it pays some respect to the tragic implications of astronauts losing their lives on their missions, it does not explore those implications deeply enough to be altogether convincing, and so the attempts at optimism in the piece ring a bit hollow and vaguely nihilistic (another symptom of californitis: “Well, yes, everybody dies in the end, boohoo, but chin up: we can have a great time while waiting!”) There is a smiley-face whimsy playing with the tragic fate of mankind that sometimes feels forced. The show also sometimes seems to work at cross-purposes with itself, as if its creators could not in the end decide exactly what they wanted the show to be, and tried to do too many things at the same time, some of them mutually undermining. (A prime example: the tragic end of the two astronauts is not adequately combined with the show’s fundamental optimism and its insistence on a happy ending, and so the ending feels unconvincing.)
The show is also a bit too long: it has effectively ended as the female astronaut, fading away in an over-sized video projection while either making her last transmission to earth or talking to herself to give herself courage after her communication link has died, takes courage to “step . . . on . . . step . . . on . . . step . . . on.” But the show’s creators, possibly because of over-commitment to the show’s ternary concept, make a false step in continuing for another ten minutes of a contrived cheerfulness that could well be lost.
Having said that, this imaginative and stimulating show’s many virtues provide an experience that is worth far more than the modest cost of admission. But make sure you bring a companion, as you will have much to talk about afterwards. Mugwumpin remains true to its gifts and its mission: of delving, above all, into questions. They are a gift to anyone who goes to theater for the spark of thought as much as for the heart’s fire.
The talented cast included, besides Stuart, Stephanie DeMott, Soren Santos, Nayeli Rodriguez, Don Wood, and Isa Musni (as the Moon). Wolfgang Wachalovsky and Darl Andrew Packard created the video projections. Natalie Greene, the company’s gifted new artistic director, directed.
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Christopher Bernard is co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. He is also a novelist (Voyage to a Phantom City and “AMOR i KAOS,” which is being run as a serial in Synchronized Chaos) and poet (Chien Lunatique and The Rose Shipwreck).
Christopher Bernard’s “AMOR i KAOS”: Sixth Installment
Love had nothing to do with it, as the song said. It was all about something in her eyes. They never let you in, and yet they didn’t shut you out completely either. Like the prayers that were her hands. No one knew who knew her, because no one really did. Yet everyone was drawn to her. She became for many of us a craving, like a drug. Her beauty was the heroic kind that turned strong men into bumbling adolescents, whimpering children, and just confused everyone else. She resented her own beauty (he could feel it). It kept lying to other people: it said I love you when she felt no love for them and I hate you when she felt no hatred. It crowded her, turned the silence she craved into a long shouting match, the darkness she loved into a display of fireworks that wore her out with their continual, compulsive brilliance.
—I know you love me but leave me alone for a while, a year, a lifetime.
She learned the hard way that beauty comes at a penalty: stares like a constant punishment.
—Everyone loves me, she said once in despair.
—No, he said, everyone wants you. I love you. And so I shall go away. Even though losing your company breaks my heart and makes me moan in the night. You will probably not believe this, but I’m going to say it anyway. You were the one who introduced me to happiness. You taught me the meaning of joy. I thought I had known before. But I hadn’t, not the ghost of it. Happiness comes with loving you and knowing I am loved by you. Joy is being in the same room with you, in your arms, in the air that surrounds you. But I can give up joy. I don’t really need to see you. Seeing you is a joy that almost intimidates me. I never need to see you, if that is what you want. Loving you is all the happiness I need. I can go on living if I have that – that is what I mean. I will have a reason to live. I can give up that joy if I can keep that happiness.
But she had already gratefully closed the door. And, for safe measure, locked it.
—And I thought you said love had nothing to do with it! Liar, she smiled, hidden in the silence and the dark.
Christopher Bernard’s Amor i Kaos: Fifth installment
I see the following:
The interior of a west coast café, with seismic support beams making a graceful right-angled triangle in the middle of the room.
Numerous café chairs, a dozen tables of various shapes and sizes, most of them occupied by leisurely eating and chatting lunchers (most are in couples, with a few small groups, and several loners seriously addressing their plates; there is a common table with several loners exaggeratedly ignoring each other behind their open lap tops); two iron railings lead up to the café’s glass door through a wall of glass looking out onto the street.
Passing cars, a truck, bus, males and females bustling, pacing, stalking by at businesslike gaits (mostly adults, a few adolescents, no children), two small, abandoned-looking trees across the street, the entrance to a parking garage with a sign flashing in red (“CAR COMING”), a cat sleeping on a backpack near the curb (no sign of the owner), three, no four, pigeons pecking in the gutter a few feet from the sleeping cat, the entrance to a 7-11, the aggressively hip windows of a Banana Republic, two narrow green doors in a wall, shut except for one that seems invitingly ajar, several open laptops, three smartphones being swiped or tapped by anxious-looking teenagers, three ballpoint pens held by two students and a tourist (the pen in my hand is the fourth), a V-neck sweater and two turtlenecks, two white quilt parkas, a business suit holding a briefcase in swift passage across the view, shadowy reflections across the street, sun, clouds, sky (just barely visible if I stretch forward and look up).
I smell: coffee, cloves, cinnamon, pastry custard, bread.
I feel: the press of corduroy against my legs. The squeeze of a vest against my torso. The rub against my wrist of my new watchband.
Not every writer exploring the family drama in its more harrowing manifestations—in this case, one so horrendous it might seem like a morbid delusion yet may reflect the experiences of more families than one would like to believe—has invented an ingenious way to handle it that makes it endurable, human and even funny without softening its awfulness. But, in his first novel, poet and playwright Richard Slota has achieved this very remarkable thing.
Tales so terrible must often be cloaked in deep fantasy to be faced at all; their starkness is too hard to look at directly—like staring directly at the sun, it can make you unable to see anything else again.
Slota’s solution has been to concoct, amid a crew of intriguing eccentrics, a brilliantly imaginative fantasy, blended with a dash of dark humor and unexpected displays of lyricism, to explore his gothic family horrors.
