Powell’s latest feels playful and honest

Courageous. Charming. A lot of laughs.

That’s the staccato lead describing my reactions to In Love…Yet Again, Jason Powell’s comic musical romp at the Alchemist Theatre that chronicles a man’s lifetime of failed relationships. If not for all the kissing, dating, and alleged lovemaking his eponymous character actually experiences, it felt like Powell was retelling significant chunks of my own life history with respect to females.

Powell repeatedly falls for beautiful, brainy, occupied women, then writes them a song that utterly fails to win their hearts.

He describes his romantic exploits to an unnamed female friend onstage (Joanna H. Kerner), who prods him on like a wry psychoanalyst. Two able actresses (Katy Johnson and Ashley Retzlaff) rotate roles as the girl of the moment, reenacting key scenes with Powell, who plays both the reflective narrator and lead actor in his own (presumably quasi-autobiographical) story. The play is directed by Mallory Metoxen with tech by Sydonia Lucchesi.

The romantic exploits start in grade school, with Powell crushing over the nerdy girl at the back of whose head he stares for seven hours a day. They trade love notes and are urged to kiss on the playground tire swing, but alas, it was not to be. This pattern continues into adulthood and via new media with much comic effect. I could relate.

The night I attended was a blast not only because of what went right but also because of what went wrong. When Powell bursts out from behind the curtain singing and doing a little jig, I admit my expectations were upset. I was anticipating a narrative play with characters and plot, but instead he starts delivering a singing monologue about his dating history. What was I in for?

The happy accident of knocking over the guitar broke the ice. 

Mid-dance, Powell picks it up like a wounded bird and strums away. But when he sits down to tune the guitar for the next song, I could sense seething expletives unspoken as the musician’s tool has now been rendered out of tune. Yet the show must go on! Powell and company use the damaged guitar to their advantage, joking about it to incorporate it into their presentation. From the moment the guitar fell, the landmine of self-referential self-importance was defused and a bond with the audience formed. This wasn’t going to be a perfect show about a whiny guy; this was a real show, warts and all, about something more universal—relationships—delivered for our entertainment as the more-or-less real guy, warts and all, bravely pokes fun at scenes reimagined from his own life. That kind of exposition of self takes courage.

I got the feeling that this show was something of a tour de force for Powell, its writer, musician, and lead actor.

His plays tend to include a trio of cute chorus girls and In Love… is no exception. Credit must go to the versatile supporting cast, who play the parade of women in Powell’s life and are able to counterbalance and appropriately undercut Powell's sometimes heavy narrative. Johnson worked with Powell in Fortuna, reprising here as a feisty redhead with a clean, high singing voice. Retzlaff hails from my alma mater, Ripon College, and delivers a captivating performance with an impressive range of facial expressions. Kerner holds everything together, plays guitar, and alternates as the mysterious recurring Zoe character by donning a ridiculous blonde wig.

After intermission, Powell calls an audience member onstage for a “date” during which both are suitably embarrassed as he serenades her with the lyrics, “I want to fill you up…with my babies.” As the audience started singing along a cappella, it felt like we were lifting lighters and swaying together to a wedding song everybody knew.

Powell’s catchy music, which feels like a cult indie folk album, blends all the dense geeky silliness we have come to expect following Invader and Fortuna. I woke up the next morning with the titular song in my head.

From an evolutionary biology perspective, In Love…Yet Again is also the perfect calling card broadcasting the fitness of the presumably single male who created it. It’s birdsong advertising Powell’s matured availability. It projects the character of a sensitive, creative guy who’s been wounded a few times, caused a few wounds himself, but remains buoyed by an innate boyish optimism that might best be called human.

If the honesty is genuine, then I wish the man much luck, for such a character deserves another chance to love and be loved. But whether or not it’s genuine for him or for us, and whether or not we're boys or girls or in a relationship or not, isn’t that what we all want?

Get Lost in the Labyrinth...

Prototype Freshwater Mag Cover

DeWolff’s Outliers far above the mean

For anyone who’s ever felt on the outside, Grace DeWolff’s Outliers is a treat.

At first I related mostly with the 8-year-old Danny (Sebastian Weigman), exiled to his Gifted & Talented classroom of one. But as the room’s science teacher Mr. Host (Luke Erickson) gets Danny to open up through patient listening and engaging in a dialogue that respects Danny as a human being—accepting his outlier status as a kid who wrote his What-I-Did-For-Summer-Vacation essay on how he stared at his backyard fence for an hour and then started to levitate—I came to identify more with the teacher.

Mr. Host is an outlier too, exiled to run the Gifted & Talented classroom, but without any real authority. Still, he takes pride in his work and a bond develops between him and Danny. There’s a lesson about patient listening and open, honest dialogue here that seems to me to apply beyond a teacher-student relationship. We sense he’s a teacher who cares deeply about his students, but mostly powerless outside of this role, yet accepting of who he is—a man who drinks tea while the other teachers drink coffee, a man who takes childlike delight in the vaporization of water, a childless man whose pencil is always perfectly sharpened.

Another actor might not have been able to make all his lines seem emotionally real because conceivably they could be read flat or ironically, but I thought Erickson was convincing. It felt like Mr. Host cared. It felt like he was empathic with Danny’s suffering.

The conflict in the first part of the play focuses on whether the teacher will give Danny an “Emotional Intelligence Survey”—an optional ScanTron test the powers-that-be want him to take in order to substantiate that the Gifted & Talented program is worth the state tax dollars. It comes secured in a blaze orange file folder sealed by loud Velcro.

Mr. Host objects to how this survey could stigmatize Danny. Danny fears it will mean he’ll be sent away. But at a high moment in their relationship, the teacher offers Danny the test that isn’t a test. Danny refuses it. He writes Mr. Host another essay instead.

It’s implied that Danny is a high-functioning autistic, though one of the points here is that his label doesn’t matter (at least in the context of the Gifted & Talented classroom). Later it’s learned that Danny has had a violent episode in another class and his mom now will require that he receive some other kind of test anyway…

Through Danny’s incessant questioning, DeWolff gives us a refresher on the value of childhood in general and the corresponding paradoxes of adulthood—Why do adults acquire tastes they don’t like? Why is everybody on a computer all the time? How does all our stuff work?

To me, the core of this play occurs when Danny uses the classroom whiteboard to lecture Mr. Host about what he’s learned about statistics. Why doesn’t his teacher incorporate error bars on the graph? Danny asks honestly. And what makes an outlier an outlier?

Danny is a bright, observant, and plucky boy, focused on understanding actuality rather than projecting appearance. He’s also overwhelmed by input, both sensory and mental, well depicted by a swelling noise effect that accompanies Danny holding his head in his hands in anguish.

When Danny reads his essay, Weigman grips and twists his notebook with the clutching intensity of kids strangling their favorite blankee. We know that everything about him is being channeled into whatever he’s focusing on, and that makes for an appealing character.

Mr. Host is almost the complete opposite in one respect—he is the portrait of self-restraint. He touches nothing with intensity, everything with gentle moderation. It’s somehow touching that the science teacher doesn’t actually—I don’t think—touch Danny at all except to shake hands, though in one scene he clearly wants to physically comfort him yet restrains, presumably out of deference to protocol and propriety. Of course, there’s more dramatic power in not having them embrace, and DeWolff wisely avoids a send-off hug.

At first, Jazmin Vollmar’s school administrator character offers a counterbalancing comic element to the story that focuses on two emotionally straightforward males, but soon her layers are also revealed. Mrs. Duchamp isn’t just a floozy administrator. She’s overwhelmed by pressures on all sides and lives in the crux of a daily dilemma—resources don’t exist to serve or independently evaluate special kids like Danny, but she’s trying to do what can be done to create some small place for him in the Gifted & Talented program; yet this escape valve is vulnerable to further budget cuts if success cannot be quantified to the “higher-ups.” She understands Danny is different, but in the interests of all the children’s safety, violent or unpredictable behavior can’t be tolerated at the school.

There are also three creative scene breaks where the characters directly address the audience, which elevates the game here. Mrs. Duchamp passes out the Emotional Intelligence Survey to the audience and reminds us how to fill in the proper bubble—but there are no wrong answers. Danny reads his essay aloud at center stage. And before inviting his class to partake in a lab experiment, Mr. Host discusses the phases of water, remarking on how, though counterintuitive, its density is not a linear function of its temperature.

As the uncle of three young kids, one of whom just turned 8, and the nephew of a longtime schoolteacher who has experienced her share of special kids over the years, I thought Outliers was a sensitive portrayal of a significant challenge to humankind and in particular facing education—how to deal with the other.

One of the reasons I tote around a platypus is to call attention to the intrinsic failure of classification systems to represent reality accurately. These systems are by nature artificial, so they cannot encompass all variety, yet they are often too useful to abandon and so they persist. One danger is thus in believing the systemic boundaries to be more real or true or valuable than reality itself. When it’s people who fall outside the boundaries of these systems is when they become particularly pernicious because there are human consequences to our systemic failures, even despite everyone’s individual best efforts.

Toward the play’s climax, we feel the pressures grinding each of the characters and restraining them in our imperfect—but real—world: Mrs. Duchamp considers Danny’s second essay in the darkness; Mr. Host considers his powerlessness to change the world to better fit its Dannys; Danny responsibly considers that maybe the next chapter in his life will help him to adapt to the world, since the world is thus far incapable of adapting to him.

Outliers is not a simple play, but neither is it complex. It feels clean and condensed, with very little wasted motion. It has an ending, but we are invited to interpret how these three characters will change offstage as well as to grapple with the equivalent challenges facing our real schools, real teachers, real students, and real governments.

Following the show, the chatter was about the quality of DeWolff’s work and that she should seek to have others pick it up. I suggested it be staged in the state capitol rotunda. It is a human look at the ramifications of societal choices, a dramatization that gives a face to one idealized little boy in a way perhaps more emotionally accessible than contemplating the tens of thousands of individuals like him in that they don’t fit the system we have built in attempt to serve our nation’s children and turn them into the next generation of adults.

Striking Thirteen

1984 is most revealing—and scariest—when you consider that Orwell’s story is about who and what we already are, not a fiction about where we are going.

I suspect this was equally true in the 1960s as it was in the real year 1984; it remains true today.

That’s how I felt when I first read the novel and I was reminded of that same sensation while attending a recent theatrical performance of 1984 at Alchemist Theatre.

The show was well staged against a corroding whitewashed prisonscape, with a partially shirtless Winston shackled up on a higher level in back. When the ex-editor doesn’t deliver the answers that the smooth disembodied voice interrogating him wants to be heard by the four attendant party members observing the political prisoner, Winston is occasionally wracked with electroshock-induced convulsions that coincide with the fluctuation of twin demonic light bulbs. Think Klingon pain sticks.

The story was also well adapted for the stage. You can’t always translate a novel to another medium—or, rather, you can’t always translate it well—but credit should go to the playwright (Michael Gene Sullivan) and the director (David Kaye) for making the most of the opportunities here. By not simply offering a linear adaptation, they actually served the original story better. Russ Bickerstaff of the Shepherd Express makes a good comparison about how theater within theater was used here to good effect. Nothing earth-shattering, but the format worked, and that’s saying something—the premise was that four presumed loyal party members observing him are encouraged to walk through Winston’s social sins so as to purge and deny them by reenactment. Something like why parental authorities might encourage children to try drugs or alcohol or swear words under controlled conditions. To get the drive for rebellion out of the system. To control taboos by permitting them as pretense—putting “wrongthinking” on display for public dissention and ridicule. A sort of reverse psychology.

Just before the very end of the play I actually contemplated that they might be preparing us for a happy ending. There was no happy ending—as there should not be. But my experience dreading that they might be leading us there—toward something like the irreverent studio cut of the real year 1985’s Brazil—suggests to me a sophisticated appreciation for how the director and cast approached 1984’s delivery. It’s been some years since I read the book but they had me believing it might go another way at the end—even though I know it cannot, must not. To explain my reaction, I must have held out some glimmer of hope that Winston won’t be utterly broken in the end, that his struggle on behalf of truth and humanity may not be futile…

I thought the show was well-cast. The flappability of Winston (played by Christopher Elst) was tremendous.

My friend Erin Hartman delivered a sexy, spunky performance as a party member who reenacts the character of Julia, Winston’s rebel lover and porn author, while she and the other quasi-childlike interrogators read through Winston’s confiscated diary. At one point she is making love to the party member playing Winston (Marcee Doherty), but breaks into a humorous aside mid-thrust.

My favorite line was also Hartman’s. Winston doesn’t know how to accept Julia’s sexual advances and makes excuses to protect himself. The Winston-actor describes his physical deficiencies, including varicose veins. “I don’t care about your veins,” Julia returns.

The most uplifting moment of the book and the play occurs just prior to Winston’s utter fall when he has an epiphany while watching the prole woman hang her laundry in the slum. She is singing.

Song is used to good effect in the theatrical version, with songstress Hartman’s beautiful voice complemented by the other characters singing at story-relevant moments, including Jeremy Eineichner’s character also humming the same song.

In some sense, another enduring quality of 1984 is the power of the human voice—whose is listened to, whose keeps on singing, whose gives voice to the voiceless, whose voice drowns out all others.

When the faceless melodious voice of the master interrogator finally reveals himself in the flesh (Michael Keiley), he reminded me a bit of James Spader, a well-manicured devil whose lack of belief in anything redeemable about humanity was believable.

I would be remiss if I neglected to mention the waterboarding scene. This was the most powerful moment for me emotionally. Clayton Hamburg plays a deliciously vile party member who pushes a restrained Winston back into a supine position, places a towel over his face, and dumps a bucket of water onto his face. This obvious resonance with torturous atrocities alleged at Guantanamo Bay caused me to react physiologically. It’s a gut-check moment.

In a recent conversation, the subject of Michel Foucault came up, and the idea that overt censorship and explicit policing is nothing compared to the self-policing of the individual mind. That, to me, has always been a main lesson of 1984—the invisible power of culture manifested in a million individual choices. This is the subtle power that, when abused, is even worse than obvious horrors like waterboarding, totalitarianism, and torture.

1984 depicts a world where editors expunge facts that don’t mesh with narratives promoted by the powerful and where writers earn a wage catering to popular biological impulses; it’s a world where history is forgotten, rewritten, and endlessly reappropriated to suit the needs of the present profit without respect for justice; a world where words are compressed, condensed, illegitimately conjugated and language bastardized in the name of economy; a world where we stare at screens looking for meaning, desperate for authority; it’s a world where we torture ourselves about being wrong and deny ourselves the ability to do right.

Somewhere…Beyond the Sea…

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).

Nonblogger

While looking up the word nonmonotonic in the dictionary I stumbled upon the definition of another word I didn’t know formally existed, nonnovelist.

A nonnovelist, as you might guess, is someone who is not writing a novel. I hope you find the existence of this word as amusing as I do. I am proud to say I am not a nonnovelist.

In recent months, however, I have been a nonblogger. The delay in posting is unfortunate and perhaps inexcusable, though not without good reasons. I am nonetheless now happy to share a few reflections of shows I’ve had the privilege of seeing at Alchemist Theatre.

Cheers!