I saw an earlier version of this piece – equal parts poetry, family drama, circus act and dance by 13th Floor, once a dance company, now doing theater as well – as a work in progress at the FURY Factory Festival of Ensemble and Devised Theater in June of this year, and so I’ll begin my review with what I said then:
“[‘Next Time I’ll Take the Stairs’ is] an elevator play, but with a difference, . . . depicting a ride to hell in the belly of the Otis Company’s most famous product. I say ‘to hell,’ but that may be over-simplifying just a hair; as 13th Floor tells it, it’s a ride to ‘a multi-storied world, inhabited by the shades of previous riders. Down is up, up is nowhere, and the memories of who you were can be re-formed by the stranger standing next to you.’ The show follows the adventures of brothers Arthur and Norris, their sister Rabbit, a lasciviously sadistic, compulsively inquisitive lady named Ivy and a disingenuous lug with a big wrench and the suspicious name of Otis, after all five crowd into an elevator that crashes into an alternative universe that is both unforgivingly absurd and weirdly sweet.
In the beginning Donald remodeled the heavens and the earth. And the heavens were sublimely beautiful and the earth was a pleasing place, but Donald was without form and void, and he hovered like a shapeless cloud over the deep.
And Donald said, Let there be Darkness. And there was darkness.
And Donald saw the darkness, that it was bad, real bad, and Donald divided the darkness from the light.
And he called the darkness day and the light he called the night. And evening and midnight were the first day.
And Donald said let there be a really classy casino town on an island, like Atlantic City, but one that doesn’t go bankrupt this time, in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters, you know like a martini before you shake it.
And Donald made the really classy casino island town and divided the waters which were under the island from those which were above, where Donald of course would be living in the penthouse.
And he called the really classy casino island Heaven. And evening and midnight were the second day.
And Donald said, Let all of the waters that were under the casino island be gathered together into one place: it will make Mar-a-Lago the coolest resort ever.
And Donald called the dry land Trumplandia and the gathering together of the waters he called the Largest Swimming Pool in Florida.
On November 8, 2016, we witnessed a kind of political 9/11, a Brexit as nuclear bomb. It felt like being given a diagnosis of terminal cancer for our society, our civilization, our way of life, or witnessing the sack of Rome by Alaric.
It isn’t the first time many of us have seen the barbarians swarm over American society: we saw it during the years of George W. Bush, of Reagan, of Nixon, when it came from the right, and during the sixties when it came, for the most part, from the left. It is one reason that, from a very early age, I grew to feel a growing alarm and fear regarding a certain strain in American culture that cultivates and breeds, preens and admires, some of the worst aspects of human nature, in the name of “freedom” to the point of license, of “personal expression” to the point of mutual contempt, of “the common man” at the expense of uncommon honesty and decency—of what I eventually came to see was a hyper, paranoid, poisonous white masculinity that would gladly rip up the restraints and norms of civilization and culture if it felt its privileges, illegitimately labeled “rights,” were threatened.
The howling Yahoo (I think it is safe to call him) who will now lead our country will be such an exact emblem of the dark side of the soul of American culture that it will effectively terminate our reputation in the world for a long time to come, if it does not terminate the world itself. I am embarrassed (though also, being human, a little proud) of the fact that I predicted this outcome, in the middle of George W. Bush’s administration: that the next successful Republican president would be a populist, know-nothing authoritarian, an out-and-out “fascist.” But it is almost shameful to be right about such things.
AvantgardARAMA! The Cutting Ball Theater The EXIT on Taylor San Francisco
The Cutting Ball Theater, one of San Francisco’s most interesting companies, opened its eighteenth season this fall by resuscitating its old AvantgardARAMA series, quiet since 2008, with an anthology of seven short pieces, some of them more or less “plays,” in the traditional sense, some of them more akin to performance art or the kinetic theater explored by such groups as foolsFURY.
As we have come to expect from Cutting Ball, the evening was stimulating even in pieces that only half-worked. There were no masterpieces but also no flops. There was the usual air of over-earnestness and political correctness that mars so much of San Francisco performance, as though art in itself were never quite enough, it always must always prove its virtue (no doubt a cross between the curse of foundation grants, the eternal American Puritanism even among the promiscuous atheists of the left, and the political hysteria that lies like a perpetual fogbank over the City by the Bay); nevertheless, the production is a must-see for anyone curious about the local theatrical avant-garde.
Cutting Ball advertises these pieces as showcasing the directors – which is fine, for the direction generally worked, sometimes keenly so, and in two of the pieces, the directors were either creators or co-creators. But I was a little puzzled. The essence of theater is not the director, as such – it is, of course, the writer (I use this term, in the abstract, to mean any theatrical creator whose work is basically off the stage). Without a writer, there is no theater – and in experimental theater, it is the writer who gives everybody else something to play with in the first place. The director (whose fundamental work takes place on the stage) is essential for any performance. But a director can do nothing with a bad or nonexistent script – that “something” which was created off the stage, however tenuous it may be – even if it was something he or she created.
And when theatrical works are being premiered – or when it can be fairly certain that the audience, for the most part, has never seen other versions of these works – it is the writers (the “creators”) who are being showcased.
That said, the direction was, as we have come to expect from Cutting Ball, energetic and adroit, though it could have made some of the pieces’ points clearer.
Of the seven pieces on show this season, the strongest, arguably, was the third: “An Evening with Activists,” written by Yussef El Guindi and directed by Rem Myers. Guindi is a past recipient of the Middle East America Distinguished Playwright Award, and it’s clear why.
His piece is an absurdist descent into a dysfunctional marriage between a baffled, spineless but well-meaning Arab named Kamal (according to the script, this means “perfection” in Arabic), played by Kunal Prasad, and a lily-white, self-righteous, overbearing, entitled left-wing activist (but is there any other kind?), played by Michelle Drexler, with the late addition of a smug, manipulative, soul-destroying right-wing neocon (played, with convincing malice, by Kevin Glass) and a deus ex machina in the form of a mindful, mind-melding sock-puppet dolphin who, for all his compassion, effectively shows Kamal what having a spine means when you are playing politics (there will be no spoilers here).
Despite an early descent into tastelessness (disappointing husband as convenient vomitorium does not a vital coup de théâtre make) it was the most memorable work of the evening, particularly as it worked most effectively as a play.
This was one of two half-hourish pieces; the other, called “The Wasps” (written by Guy Zimmerman and directed by Paige Rogers), is about Jenna and Barbara Bush, daughters of the opprobrious W. (performed with overbearing accents and white trash panache by Melanie DuPuy and Danielle O’Hare), who are awaiting experimental termination by unknown forces in a laboratory after the world has finally been devastated by climate change.
They chatter absurdities, by turn delirious, lyrical, witty, catty, cold, prideful, sexy, and paranoid, careening between the wise and the bizarre, and dance, dance, dance – as though their dancing is all that still keeps the world alive. A cleverly conceived, sometimes brilliantly written piece (though unnecessarily opaque – I didn’t really get what it was all about till I read the press release later – and the program notes provide no help whatsoever), it goes on too long: from mid-point onward, having made its basic philosophical and poetic points, it doesn’t seem to know where to go, so it repeats itself and ends, as T.S. Eliot predicted the world would, with a whimper. But there is many a bright moment along the way.
The shorter pieces contained some of the evening’s most memorable moments. The evening opened with a duet between the two halves of Virginia Woolf’s divided self (this was written by Susan Terris, directed by Carlos Mendoza and performed by Melanie DuPuy and Danielle O’Hare, who didn’t inhabit British mannerisms as comfortably as the dusty, waspish Texas poses of Zimmerman’s piece).
This was followed by a fascinating if not exactly transparent solo piece (created by performer Valentina Ermeri and director Beatrice Basso), written in English and Italian, that seemed to be about a childhood rape and the breaking of the protagonist’s self into “pezzeti” – fragments that may nevcr be pieced back together. It features a long, thick rope (probably a more germane prop than the teddy bear promised in the press release) that the soloist drags about with her and hugs, as she babbles with a kind of insatiable and insane lyricism – the rope ominously suggesting both a horrifically serpentine phallus and a noose from which the splintered protagonist may one day hang.
A contemporary evening of experimental plays would be incomplete without a satire on the breathtaking crudities of our political moment, in this case woven together in a polyphony of internet videos and voiceovers and performed in dance and oratory by Hillary and Donald surrogates, Louis Acquisto and Suzy Myre, who collaborated with choreographer and directer Katerina Wong. “Crooked and Dangerous” was the evening’s bon-bon.
One of the pieces was written in Spanish (with English supertitles): a lyrical exposition (based partly on Francisco Garcia Lorca’s notorious work of “impossible theater,” “An Audience”) of the vagaries of love between a straight Spanish woman who is infatuated with him and the gay poet, and the terrible way he died, during the Spanish Civil War, not only for his politics, but above all and most brutally for his homosexuality. Maria Velasco wrote (Daniel Sullivan translated for the supertitles) and Sonia Sebastian directed “Lorca al vacio”; Xavier Galando played Lorca and Erika Yanin Peréz played his frustrated paramour.
A charming surprise was “Inkwell,” which in four satisfying minutes gives us a writer who escapes into the rhetoric of the past while his muse – and a crocodile – keep trying to drag him back (in one case, literally) into the flatness, blankness, and integrity of the reality about which he must write. This was written by sixteen-year-old Isaac Schott-Rosenfield and directed by his teacher, Isaiah Dufort. I look forward to more plays from Mr. Schott-Rosenfield. The lesson of his play struck a nerve.
All of the plays in this anthology struck a nerve, some more effectively, some less so. But they all left us something to take home with them, think about and argue over. I can’t think of a better reason to go to the theater.
_____
Christopher Bernard is author of two novels, A Spy in the Ruins and Voyage to a Phantom City, and of the play “The Beast & Mr. James.” His new collection of poems, Chien Lunatique, is forthcoming from Regent Press. Mr. Bernard is also co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.
I drink to the moon
staring up at me
from the face in the puddle
of mud at my feet.
And behind the face of the moon
reflected in the mud
is the entire universe!
A haze of little stars
salt and peppered in dazzling sparks,
infinitely, down to the bottom of the world!
And there also
hee hee! –
is my face!
Hello, face!
Hello, universe reflected in the sumptuous mud!
Hello, mindless, soulless, beautiful moon!
Oh let me die
and all the world perish
between two breaths in my sleep.
Let everything vanish between two beats of my heart!
One day I shall cease to be, moon!
It will be no time for humility then – no! – I’ve
had it with modesty!
I will die as I have lived – arrogant, proud, insolent, conceited!
I will have no time for good manners and politesse!
You will not like it, God!
Well, what are you going to do about it!
I denounce God! I hail sun, stars, moon!
I hail my fellow mosquitoes,
buzzing blithely in the deliciously foul air above the mud pool!
Mosquitoes are my brothers!
We all buzz about in a confusion of lust, fight and anger,
aimless, random, driven,
then into the nearest sewer we dive. Tant pis! Tant mieux!
I toast you, mosquitoes! I toast you,
blind, deaf moon! Hail, moon!
And stars! And sun! And sky!
The metaverse that was and is and shall be forever!
One day I will cease to be, who am, now, alive!
____________
Three days later, on his way to his favorite café (and drunk, as usual),
the author of the above poem was hit by an Uber driver.
On the ambulance he was overheard laughing to himself and saying,
in an excited whisper: “. . . who am, now, . . . !”
He died on the way to the hospital.
The morticians had a difficult time removing the rictus from his lips.
_____
Christopher Bernard’s new collection of poems, Chien Lunatique, is forthcoming from Regent Press.
