The Burning House Group
Review: "Gulf War"
Fire and Ice
The Burning House Group
meet Joyce Carol Oates in Gulf War
by Michael Tortorello
In the business, the sentence you are
currently reading is called the lead. The
alliterative, boldface words at the top of the page are the
head, and the short,
descriptive "teaser" phrase that follows is the sub-head.
If the head and sub-head
are intriguing enough, more people will read what comes after
them; look--that's
what you're doing right now. The name beneath the sub-head--which
savvy
readers may already equate with the response, "skip to
the next page"--is the
byline; it serves the secondary purpose of reminding the editor
who should
receive the paycheck. That word needs no translation. This
sentence plus the
five that you already read are collectively known as a graf.
Every industry has its own jargon; now that our species has
lost its olfactory
sensitivity, jargon helps identify who is in one's tribe and
who is goyish. Actors
are no exception to the rule. Or so it seems after speaking
with The Burning
House Group, a talented, two-year-old theater ensemble currently
staging Joyce
Carol Oates's Gulf War at the Pillsbury House Theatre.
"We're
interested in using the body as a complete instrument," actor
Heidi Hunter
Batz explains, "not just the thought and intellect." To
tune this "instrument," the
five members of the company--Allen Baker, Randal Berger, Heidi
Hunter Batz,
Matt Guidry, and Noel Raymond--have conducted a series of involved
workshops
with other area actors. In conversation with the group, the
technique-titles come
hard and fast: SITI, Viewpoints, Grotowski. Randal Berger and
Matt Guidry have
studied and performed with the Margolis Brown company, whose
movement-theater method and its notions of "energy" have
also entered the workshop mix.
If The Burning House Group is to be believed, becoming a complete
actor is as
detailed a process as training to be a Jedi knight--and only
a little less spiritual.
In previous productions--12th Night
in 1994, and the three-part Fireball Set last
summer--The Burning House Group employed an aesthetic of barely
controlled
chaos; I watched an hour of Heiner Müller's Hamlet Machine
without ever
ascertaining which character was Hamlet. With the departure
of John O'Donahue,
who directed Hamlet Machine, the Burning House Group has jettisoned
the
chaos and tightened the control. Batz describes a "discipline
and commitment to
work," learned from workshops with the New York-based
SITI company. At the
same time, she claims their new emphasis on "physical
vocabulary" has brought
a creative liberation. As evidence, Batz points to the speed
with which the
company created the intricate blocking of Gulf War; it took
just over a month.
"We're like kids in a candy store now," she says.
Noel Raymond explains it with
the militancy of the converted: "Structure is freedom."
"All
this sounds ridiculous when we try to describe it," Allen
Baker acknowledges.
But like Margolis Brown, the endpoint of the jargon process
is a visually engaging
and highly accessible theater product. "We know there's
nothing worse than not
connecting with an audience," Baker says.
One of the ironies
of staging Oates's Gulf War after months of cathartic
movement training is that the defining physical characteristic
of the play's four
characters is invisible to the audience: The sphincter. Nicole
and Stuart Bell
(played by Raymond and Randal Berger) are as tightly-wound
as mummies--and
every bit as white. He is part corporate climber and part little
Hitler. "I love you,"
he tells his wife. "I hope you know that's the bottom
line." She is a prematurely
retired weatherwoman ruined by a fear of storms: One can only
smile vapidly in
the face of disaster for so long before something gives.
Together,
the Bells live in the "Fox Hill Hollow Planned
Residential Development";
their redwood deck overlooks an artificial pond. The set--cold,
spare, and white--defines the sterility and desolation of life
in the Hollow. (An anecdote for the
Bargain Basement Guide to Scenic Design: Berger claims to have
built the couch
by sawing his own bed in half.) When Nicole mixes her "vitamins" with
a few
tonic-less gin and tonics, the floor begins tilting beneath
her. Stuart has a ready
solution: "Maybe if we got some wall to wall carpeting
in here...."
The Widmarks, Mitzi and DeForrest, arrive
at cocktail hour. DeForrest is a man
five years past the last promotion he'll ever get. To Stuart,
he smells like carrion.
Allen Baker plays DeForrest as a full-time somnambulist, shuffling
and mumbling
across an infinite plateau of boredom. His eyes alone suggest
animation; they
bounce ping-pong-style across his black-framed glasses like
a Felix-the-Cat
clock. To compensate for her deadbeat husband, Mitzi is super-animated;
when
she wants attention, she holds her bloody mary overhead like
the statue of liberty.
Heidi Hunter Batz gives Mitzi a certain hunch to the shoulders
that telegraphs the
word "yenta." Her chest appears concave, as if moulded
around a curved
wooden coat hanger. In the Widmarks, one sees the Bells, plus
30 years. The
Widmarks' anxieties have leaked through the containment chamber
of corporate
propriety; they might actually list starboard to compensate
for the floor's phantom
tilt.
Whether characters like these in fact still exist could
be open for debate. When
Stuart and DeForrest finally connect, over scotch and angina
on the redwood
deck, it plays as a frantic trading of economic statistics--jargon
makes the world
go 'round. What the scene shows, other than the fact that Joyce
Carol Oates
doesn't read The Wall Street Journal enough to pull this off,
is a fairly shopworn
take on shoptalk. People, it seems, can't ever really communicate.
(Maybe
you've heard that before.) For what it's worth, I suspect the
play, which the
relentlessly prolific Ms. Oates probably knocked off in a good
afternoon's work, is
in large part an excuse for the shaggy dog joke that comes
three-fourths of the
way through. Needless to say, it is a very good shaggy dog
joke.
While the actors' carefully choreographed movement produces
a sharp comic
surface, they risk presenting Oates's automatons as, well,
automatons. And
when Noel Raymond tries to go for the tears, the well comes
up dry. In a year,
The Burning House Group has switched from the entropy of Hamlet
Machine to
the enthalpy of Oates Machine. To carry a thermodynamic metaphor
too far, the
company might do well to transfer some of the pressure built
up in The Gulf War
into warmer energy for their next production. Here, we may
have the rare case of
a success succeeding too well.
Gulf War runs through September
21 at the Pillsbury House Theatre.
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