Photography by John Ranard
Romantic theater from its infancy with Hugo, Lord Byron and Buchner has had as one aim to make each individual audience member experience something new or, put more mundanely, thrill to a new frisson. However, there is one branch of this tradition, that of Artaud (to which the current production at the Theater for New City, New Science, belongs), which has made a radical modification of this goal. This modification can most easily be explained via an example. Imagine you are sitting in a theater, but, for the moment, you are not absorbed in the staging or even in savoring your own emotions, but suddenly shocked, even spooked, by a dawning awareness of what others in the audience are feeling. Think how unusual this is. Knowledge of a collective mood is not what is looked for in your average theater experience, but it is an intrinsic part of a certain way of doing drama. Before giving an example of how this sensation emerges in New Science, let me describe the type of play that can produce it.
Artaud's plans for a staging of The Conquest of Mexico envisioned a theatrical experience centered on the activities of populations, not singular people. something like what was accomplished in film by Eisenstein's Potemkin or Jansco's The Red and The White. In such works, the company provides a picture of a whole people, which may make the audience come to feel its own sensation of being a group. In this line, New Science sets out to recount the overall apocalypse/apotheosis of Any Metropolis, U.S.A., using a flood of visual, sonic and tactile aids to depict this rise and fall.
Four actors (Sheila Dabney, Claire Lebowitz, Pamela Mayo and Thomas S. Walker) tell the tale in part as chorus, in part solo, backed up by the amazing bass playing of Naisha Walton, the incantatory singing of Adela Bolet and a set cleared of the usual theater seating -- the audience sits in clumps throughout the multi-leveled space -- and partially reconstructed during the performance, dominated by a large screen on one wall that mixes silent film-like titles with simultaneous videoing of the actors in motion. In other words, the play is a multimedia bath that deliciously swamps, at times almost drowns, the viewers in sensory overload.
The characters describe the anxiety of living within a Mega-Gotham City, teetering on the brink of disaster and chaos, and how their fears are only allayed by the worship of god. This deity is (figuratively) carried on with much pomp, elevated to a pedestal, and then completely ignored. presumably because his (Johnson Anthony's) finely rendered, half-ranted, half-whispered monologue takes the citizens to task for their lack of spirituality. The resolute choral/individual declamations about the city are not simple recitations but given great tone and verve by taking place within director Martin Reckhaus's interlocking choreography, which has the four huddling, leapfrogging, spiraling, and tiptoeing around the space as the subject dictates.
By this point, it may seem I am describing an exciting and stimulating jumble, given that the themes of the work seem so broad and vague, but the author, Jessica Slote, has beveled the drama around a number of key contradictions, such as us/them and us/nature, and used these to give body to the presentation. For instance, taking up the second motif, in one scene, two of the actors use animal masks to half-cover -- leaving their snarling human teeth visible -- their faces, and prowl menacingly around the two hapless humans. Suddenly, a flash of light and roles reverse. Humans are chowing down on the slaughtered beasts. (Or are the dead simply humans who had donned animal faces?)
Almost the whole work gives a collective portrait of the city, except for the end where, in a startling coup de theater, the universal exposition is dropped and the last moments unfold in the bosom of a nuclear family. Yet, given the previous, it is obvious that this family holds inside it and can only be understood from the perspective of the totality. Knowledge of the cog is dependent on seeing the vast machinery of the state, which this play triumphantly explores.
To return to my starting point, only such a monumental, choral, super-sensory approach can render a new way of looking at ... the audience of which you are a member. This is a tradition that in America has fallen on the wayside since the 1960s, so if you want to see a work that magnificently and robustly upholds this tradition, go to New Science, where you will find yourself thrust at points into an appreciation of the collective in, for example, the following moment in the play. The four actors, supplemented by the singer, bass, and light effects, began to be frightened. They feel the presence of mysterious and potently evil "creatures," stirring in the surrounding woods. Halfway through this evocative and impassioned passage, we, the audience as a whole, realize we are the terrifying animals that ring and endanger the troupe, just as in "real life," we, every group, pose a collective threat to punish our world by destroying it.
Artaud's plans for a staging of The Conquest of Mexico envisioned a theatrical experience centered on the activities of populations, not singular people. something like what was accomplished in film by Eisenstein's Potemkin or Jansco's The Red and The White. In such works, the company provides a picture of a whole people, which may make the audience come to feel its own sensation of being a group. In this line, New Science sets out to recount the overall apocalypse/apotheosis of Any Metropolis, U.S.A., using a flood of visual, sonic and tactile aids to depict this rise and fall.
Four actors (Sheila Dabney, Claire Lebowitz, Pamela Mayo and Thomas S. Walker) tell the tale in part as chorus, in part solo, backed up by the amazing bass playing of Naisha Walton, the incantatory singing of Adela Bolet and a set cleared of the usual theater seating -- the audience sits in clumps throughout the multi-leveled space -- and partially reconstructed during the performance, dominated by a large screen on one wall that mixes silent film-like titles with simultaneous videoing of the actors in motion. In other words, the play is a multimedia bath that deliciously swamps, at times almost drowns, the viewers in sensory overload.
The characters describe the anxiety of living within a Mega-Gotham City, teetering on the brink of disaster and chaos, and how their fears are only allayed by the worship of god. This deity is (figuratively) carried on with much pomp, elevated to a pedestal, and then completely ignored. presumably because his (Johnson Anthony's) finely rendered, half-ranted, half-whispered monologue takes the citizens to task for their lack of spirituality. The resolute choral/individual declamations about the city are not simple recitations but given great tone and verve by taking place within director Martin Reckhaus's interlocking choreography, which has the four huddling, leapfrogging, spiraling, and tiptoeing around the space as the subject dictates.
By this point, it may seem I am describing an exciting and stimulating jumble, given that the themes of the work seem so broad and vague, but the author, Jessica Slote, has beveled the drama around a number of key contradictions, such as us/them and us/nature, and used these to give body to the presentation. For instance, taking up the second motif, in one scene, two of the actors use animal masks to half-cover -- leaving their snarling human teeth visible -- their faces, and prowl menacingly around the two hapless humans. Suddenly, a flash of light and roles reverse. Humans are chowing down on the slaughtered beasts. (Or are the dead simply humans who had donned animal faces?)
Almost the whole work gives a collective portrait of the city, except for the end where, in a startling coup de theater, the universal exposition is dropped and the last moments unfold in the bosom of a nuclear family. Yet, given the previous, it is obvious that this family holds inside it and can only be understood from the perspective of the totality. Knowledge of the cog is dependent on seeing the vast machinery of the state, which this play triumphantly explores.
To return to my starting point, only such a monumental, choral, super-sensory approach can render a new way of looking at ... the audience of which you are a member. This is a tradition that in America has fallen on the wayside since the 1960s, so if you want to see a work that magnificently and robustly upholds this tradition, go to New Science, where you will find yourself thrust at points into an appreciation of the collective in, for example, the following moment in the play. The four actors, supplemented by the singer, bass, and light effects, began to be frightened. They feel the presence of mysterious and potently evil "creatures," stirring in the surrounding woods. Halfway through this evocative and impassioned passage, we, the audience as a whole, realize we are the terrifying animals that ring and endanger the troupe, just as in "real life," we, every group, pose a collective threat to punish our world by destroying it.
