ELEVATORS TO HELL, GUARDS ON A WIRE, HONEYMOON PIE, AND OTHER FURIOUS TRIUMPHS
A review by Christopher Bernard
FURY Factory Festival of Ensemble and Devised Theater
Various performance spaces in San Francisco
June 14–26, 2016
Terry Crane, Lyam White, Maria Glanz (above), Janet McAlpin, and David Godsey, in UMO’s “Fail Better.” Photo by Jeff Dunnicliff
This year’s FURY Factory Festival of Ensemble and Devised Theater shook up the stages in San Francisco’s SoMa recently. Some of the performances were thrilling, and all were worth a visit.
Not least was Seattle’s UMO Ensemble, at the Joe Goode Annex for three performances of “Fail Better: Beckett Moves UMO,” a mind-bending event of pure theater, funny and dark and sharp, based on the writings of the Irish writer. This was physical theater at its most intriguing, turning the dense existential tropes of the great, bleak modernist into brilliantly apropos circus acts – complete with rope-climbing, dancing, wrestling, acrobatics, plus a bit of chocolate tasting (not shared with the audience, unfairly) and prancing about on a teeter-totter – with a sprinkling of brilliant writing on top.
Actually, the brilliant writing was the foundation (which is, no doubt, what distinguishes theater from, say, dance or music or the circus, or, for that matter, a restaurant). What UMO has done here is included most of the elements of live performance (the only ones missing were live music and edibles for the audience), compacted, condensed, sorted and refined to mordant essences.
The show begins with an appropriately Beckettian tableau: a Godot-esque couple of tramps and a Happy Day-esque couple straddle a great, ungainly teeter-totter athwart a light-bathed stage, behind which a grand dame in a scruffy garden-party gown and hat, all of which have both seen better days, officiates from inside a small, chapel-like niche. A spare, almost fleshless gentleman in whites steps forward and, between shy smiles, offers a brief passage from Beckett’s seminal novel The Unnameable, then retreats to an Apple laptop at the back and starts tapping away, threading (apparently) out of his entrails (one of the characters complains at one point, “Are these our words – or his?”) the comedy of bittersweet nothings we are about to be entertained by.
