For the second time in as many ventures to witness a Fools 4 Tragedy production, I’ve been impressed.
Last time it was their rendition of Hamlet back in August 2011. This time, the show was Waiting and I was fortunate to get in on a Thursday night performance in February that was not sold out.
First, the Alchemist Theatre lounge was littered with books with bookmarks in them, including by Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorites, inviting those “waiting” before the performance to peruse literature.
We were ushered to sit on chairs and stools stacked on the theater stage itself, to face the theater seats illuminated by stage lights, where the play’s action took place. This peculiar inversion of space and expectation worked well for this show.
Each night the actors rotate roles, but the night I went featured Jordan Gwiazdowski as the character Go Go, who is stuck in this time warp inside a “Gay Paris” theater infinitely waiting for a rehearsal that never comes. He’s angsty and wiry and channeling just a bit of Matt Smith’s Doctor. He wears purple.
He is soon joined by another character wearing purple, Di Di, who enters the room as if on cue as Go Go pores over the opening lines of the script. But the cue is not for her. And immediately the two begin to argue vaporously. It turns out the two know each other; and one of them harbors an emotional longing for the other but cannot express it, while it’s not clear why the other has really chosen to come to this theater. Di Di is ostensibly there for “rehearsal,” to begin work on a three-month contract on a script she hasn’t read. But Go Go says he’s read the script and the contract—468 times or thereabouts—but only after his arrival in this place. The audience is led to believe that there is some contractual language that binds these characters to this space and time and, as Di Di can’t seem to open the door to leave, that keeps them inside this room.
It’s a bit like the psychological drama at the heart of Cube, the movie, and also like a good Twilight Zone episode where it’s all about characters running up against an almost metaphysical wall that in the subtly twisted prism of their world has suddenly taken on rude and horrifically oppressive dimensions.
But just when things might languish in a nightmare of solipsistic torment, in cavort two newcomers to the theater, played on my night by Michael Traynor and Jacob Anderson. Traynor plays a slick-dressed apple-chewing (and improvisationally spitting out apple pieces as though unable to properly swallow food) producer with great comic heft. Anderson at one point breaks out of the hoodie-huddled savant fetal position to utter a poem by Whitman in some kind of attempt at Scottish brogue, to the tortured chagrin of the other characters and the wrenching delight of the actual audience, who cringe with the characters with each turn of the page of his giant notepad. This is the actors’ “director,” for whom they’ve waited long to arrive, but who offers no real answers.
Oh, and all this time there’s a guy in the back of the theater just sitting there.
The other characters see him, but don’t interact with him. He just slumps there with Aviator sunglasses and a beard, watching them without noticeable reaction.
Turns out he’s the “writer” who at play’s end, though he does not speak with his own voice, punctuates Di Di and Go Go’s choice-making final interaction with the closest thing to godlike grace to leave them with their free will realized and intact.
It’s not a story in the strictest Aristotelian sense. Like Waiting for Godot that inspired it, which I confess I have not read or seen performed but only know cultural references to, it’s a play about waiting for nothing.
There also were references to the failure of consumption—Go Go can’t seem to actually eat his chicken salad sandwich; at one point he stuffs them at his face but misses his mouth and drops into a kind of disturbing trance before Di Di shakes him out of it. And Traynor’s NotPozzo is hilarious just spitting apple chunks everywhere; it’s bizarre, but reads almost like he is unable to actually consume real food and reinforces his two-dimensionality, that he’s a theatrical phantasm that doesn’t possess real life or the facsimile of a supernatural being who can’t process food.
This isn’t a play for everyone. But it does move somewhere. When Go Go starts asking “Why?” seeking motivation and discovering his own, there is a sort of climax even though more formal than dramatic. His ability to love himself is what his writer deems central to the ability to live and to act and to make choices. The tragedy is that we then witness Go Go nonetheless choose to stay in the darkness of the once inescapable theater even though he has earned the freedom to leave with the woman he once desired, when she does not love him but is nonetheless willing to accept him.
There’s just something very meaningful about all this.
The quality of the performance and the care taken to deliver it, if those can be said to be at all distinct, were both high. The premise was creative; in lesser hands it would have been tedious, but I never felt bored or let down. Not that every moment of tension manufactured by Jordan’s Go Go was perfectly real, but I felt let in on a probing mind that searches the deepest folds of its soul and is mostly disappointed with what is turned up.
No characters in the play achieve redemption in my reading of the play, but the redemption is meant for us, the audience, to become more than the driftwood set pieces Di Di compares us to, staring blankly at something without interacting with it on some emotional level, without being alive. And so there’s almost a missionary component to this performance, that its crew is reaching out to human others to activate their (our…your) consciousness to the possibilities of choice in our own lives and to prod us to make those choices and not sit around “waiting” for something to happen to us or for someone to come in and tell us what to do or how to behave.
This is an adult play because a child would not understand it. A child is functionally dependent upon his parents for sustenance. A child would wait forever. An adult fends for himself and his kin group. An adult tragically both creates the walls of rooms like the one the Waiting characters find themselves trapped inside (a kind of sickness), but also possesses the maturity to see the room for what it is and to use the door to exit into a wider world (and become well again).
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