The Burning House Group
Review: "WhiRLigig"
No Matter
Sam Shepard flails; Aurora Fire flames;
Burning House Group fabulates
by Peter Ritter
An eagle dives out of the sky and picks
up a tomcat in its talons. The two animals start
ripping each other to shreds, but neither will let go--the
eagle won't give up its prey; the
tomcat knows he'll fall to his death. This familiar metaphor,
which ends Sam Shepard's
Curse of the Starving Class, perfectly circumscribes the playwright's
take on our human
condition: We are, all of us, starving beasts "fighting
like crazy in the middle of the sky."
It might also illuminate Shepard's pathological distaste for
resolution; like a good Cold
Warrior, he intuits that the elliptical logic of mutual assured
destruction is preferable to
the alternative.
Shepard, who managed to become one of America's
preeminent playwrights without
ever properly finishing a play, is probably best known for
the surrealist Americana of
Fool for Love and True West. Action and 4-H Club, the two early
one-act plays now
being presented by Arbor Heavy Theatre at the Loring Playhouse,
are perhaps most
interesting as rough sketches for these later works. In Action,
directed by Rob Rachow,
Shepard offers a glimpse of the sort of domestic stasis that
pervades his mature plays:
Four people with names like Jeep and Shooter smash things and
scream at one
another while making silly, absurdist proclamations like "Walt
Whitman was a great
man!" and "I've never been afraid of baths!" 4-H
Club, while even less coherent,
presages Shepard's use of violent anti-catharsis. Indeed, in
its resolute formlessness, it
resembles nothing so much as a psychotic episode. An astute
pharmacist might
prescribe a mild sedative on the evidence of Action, and an
industrial-strength
tranquilizer on that of 4-H Club. Any sort of analgesic would
do nicely for the audience.
Even most good one-acts are like
unfinished sentences: The playwright disgorges some
inchoate notion, runs clean out of inspiration, and calls it
a play. Action and 4-H Club,
which are not good one-acts at all, leave Arbor Heavy's fine
cast in the lurch when
Shepard's wits leave him. At that point, the playwright's misanthropy
devolves into a
mini-orgy of destruction. Among the victims: two chairs, one
turkey, one assiduously
vivisected fish, some mice, and one audience's patience.
Two
acts is one act too many in David Allen's Cheapside, now being
given an almost
undeservedly sensitive staging by Aurora Fire Theatre. Set
in the grimy theatrical
underworld of Elizabethan London, Cheapside inhabits the same
Stoppardesque milieu
as Shakespeare in Love (which it predates by a decade). Yet
without the discursive wit
of the latter, Allen manages only to suggest that hack writers,
like the poor, will always
be with us.
The hack in question is Robert Greene (Edwin Strout),
a wheezy, besotted also-ran
whose theater career is waning as those of Christopher Marlowe
and William
Shakespeare wax (Mark Mattison plays both men in an inspired
turn). The play begins
promisingly enough, with Greene and Marlowe mocking an offstage
rehearsal of
Shakespeare's "documentary rubbish" (Henry IV). The
Bard, as it turns out, is a bit of a
careerist, who appropriates freely from his contemporaries.
Greene is besieged by more
pressing troubles; his libertine tastes and the upkeep of a
mistress (Michaela Kallick)
force him to produce inflammatory pamphlets designed to incite
anti-Catholic fervor.
Hanging around Greene's hovel, meanwhile, is Cutting Ball (Kevin
Irvin), a bristling punk
whose name refers to a penchant for performing nonelective
surgery on his enemies.
The real trouble begins at intermission,
however. If one were feeling generous, she
might conjecture that the playwright suffered some sort of
debilitating depressive
episode halfway through the composition of Cheapside. Whatever
the case, the light
comedy of the first act turns without warning into anarchy
in the U.K., punctuated by
discordant bursts of Seventies punk. Marlowe gets a sword in
his eye, Cutting Ball is
strung up by the neck, London's theaters are closed, and Cheapside
lurches toward its
depressing denouement. As a portrait and an example of thwarted
promise, Cheapside
may ultimately evince the old Shakespearean adage that nothing
is well begun except
that which is well ended.
The Burning House Group, a local
troupe whose rigorous philosophy of movement
could get one arrested in China, has been working quietly on
its latest production,
WhirRLigig: Life and Perspective 101, for nearly two years.
Based on the writings of
Stephen Hawking and certain theories of quantum mechanics,
the result asks (per the
program notes) "What is REAlity and what is merely a POint
of VieW...and is there
really a DIFFerence?" along with other unNEcessarily CAPitalIZed
QUESTions.
Chaos theory as applied to movement theater, in
case you were wondering,
hypothesizes that if you wear silly green jumpsuits and run
around long enough,
something entertaining will occur. The dramatis personae in
this relatively comic
comedy of relativity include an Electron (Matt Guidry), a Particle
(Ally Baker), and
Sound Waves played by musician Jeff Toffler. Guidry manages
to generate some
energy as the Electron, but Baker's Particle lacks weight,
and Randal Berger as Dark
Matter remains largely theoretical throughout.
I'm trying to
be funny, by the way. I think the Burning House Group is too,
although this
remains a working hypothesis and has not been conclusively
borne out by the data thus
far collected.
Action and 4-H Club run through January 15 at
the Loring Playhouse; (612) 333-2792.
Cheapside runs through January 30 at the Cedar-Riverside People's
Center; (612) 879-
0577. WhirRLigig runs through January 31 at the Loring Playhouse;
(612) 333-2172.
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