Inside Today's Bulletin
Inside Today's Bulletin
Technical, Classical Brilliance Opens Festival
By: Jim McCaffrey, The Bulletin
09/04/2007
Philadelphia - Technical and performing excellence illustrating the future and continuing relevance of theater marked two Philadelphia Live Arts presentations this weekend.
Whit MacLaughlin points to the future of theater in his New Paradise Laboratories' "Batch: An American Bachelor/ette Party Spectacle,"
playing at the Mandell Theater on the campus of Drexel University through Sept. 15.
MacLaughlin's production is a stunning, technical marvel and a performance triumph. The multimedia design by Jorge Cousineau is a jaw-dropping, space and time disorienting, magnificent four-screen tableau that is nothing short of an accomplished computer- and film-generated achievement.
An idea of the careful consideration, time and expense that went into the effort to realize the New Paradise Laboratories' abstract vision of the modern pre-wedding ritual was casually hinted at when MacLaughlin, attending a performance of "Gatz" on Sunday, mentioned he scrapped film from a five-day shoot just before the performance because "it just didn't work."
In bachelor/bachelorette parties, MacLaughlin and Los Angeles playwright Alice Tuan recognize the inherent silliness and seriousness of the occasion, along with the clear, if unconscious, enactment of a pagan bacchanal.
You'd be tempted to call the piece pantheistic for the sake of the pun - Pan, the goat god, makes a memorable appearance - but the word has deistic connotations missing in this script.
Instead, the bawdy script takes elements of Gertrude Stein, uncensored Marx Brothers, Luis Brunel, Man Ray, Jake LaMotta and Larry Flynt, throws them in a blender and mixes them with an exquisitely prepared cast.
Matthew Saunders cleverly sets the cast on a pedestal, leaving the audience in the posture of worshipful onlookers as statutes in classical poses comically come alive.
If "Batch" is the future of the theater, "Gatz" represents a new and exciting take on classic theater.
"Gatz," presented by New York's Elevator Repair Service, is a production people will talk about for many, many years.
It is on the simplest level a literal, line-by-line complete reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The company adds the conceit that a man working in a dingy office, probably in New York, one day comes to work, can't get his computer to work and so begins reading Gatsby out loud.
While this may seem thin in the tradition of great theater, it is much more than any description will convey.
Those of you who have seen the film "Vanya" on 42nd Street will understand immediately the concept of "Gatz."
Director John Collins started rehearsing "Gatz" in 1999. The more he worked with his cast on the script, the more he was certain he wanted to use every word of Fitzgerald's novel.
The company had problems getting the estate's permission to use the entire text of The Great Gatsby in a production. Collins put the delay to good use. The company continued to rehearse for love of their craft and because they became enamored with the text.
The result is a revelatory deconstruction of Fitzgerald that points out much of the hokum in the writing, while compassionately transforming it into a revelatory humor.
It seems no member of the cast meets Fitzgerald's description of his characters. Nick is short and red haired, Daisy is lithe, but a brunette, Tom looks and acts like the Dunkin' Donuts man on a diet, round with a face dominated by a black mustache.
Yet the cast is taut as a virtuoso's violin string as it brings layers of nuance and remembered, unnoticed, intended and unintended meaning to the text.
Their interpretation telescopes the audience from small intimacy - the feeling of experiencing rather than just knowing Nick and Daisy and Tom and Jay's feelings - to the large, omniscient knowledge of the pending tragedy, back to the personal feeling of interaction when actors wink and let the audience in on the discoveries they made through their close reading of the text, and back out to the satisfying, slightly snobbish, entirely Gatsby feeling of being in on jokes Fitzgerald never imagined.
In the contemporary America of haves and have-nots, where East Coast Ivy League-educated elites direct the country into disasters without analyzing the costs and consequences of their actions, Gatsby takes on a revelatory meaning and relevance for our times.
This performance held the audience's complete attention for 7 ½ hours. During the three 10-minute breaks and one-hour intermission for a meal, the audience remained enthralled with the storytelling, anxious to retake their seats to hear more of the oft-told tale.
But glory belonged not to the actors alone. This company, like MacLaughlin's company the night before, worked as a seamless whole.
Collins' direction made full use of Louisa Thompson's imaginative set design, relying heavily on Mark Barton's chilling lighting design while gleefully incorporating Ben Williams' memorable sound design. These production values, for all their considerable demonstration of professional prowess, just managed to keep up with the cast's incredible dedication, discipline, athleticism, stamina and talent.
"Gatz" is one of those I-Was-There productions that only live performance art can give to an audience.
For every individual there, what Gatz is will be measured by its ability to grow in importance and satisfaction as, a decade, two decades or more later, you find the one person among millions who also witnessed that event and you both rejoice in that happy circumstance by recalling the amazing drinking scene, or the way a certain moment was lit, or the subtle sound design. And all the while you are really only just celebrating and affirming the special knowledge that you have met someone who can attest that once you really did witness the magic, the moment, the chemistry of something great.
As a Saturday-night filler between "Gatz" and the Fringe Festival's Late Night Cabaret, I attended the Call Me Crazy Music production of "The Jingle Man."
If you are a fan of the "gee whiz, let's-put-on-a-musical" productions in the tradition of "The Music Man" or "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," this was a production for you. There were some good voices, a lot of energy, and the dancers were well-rehearsed.
"The Jingle Man" was the kind of production that would make a not very ambitious but extremely eager community theater proud.
Jim McCaffrey can be reached at jmccaffrey@thebulletin.us
©The Evening Bulletin 2007
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