"No Dice"

German has its angst, French its beauty, Italian its romance and Spanish its passion. The American language may not even possess the stiff upper lip of its British cousin, but it now has its own play. Thanks to the nutty folks at the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, the lingua franca of business, entertainment and the Internet is the unwilling star of “No Dice”, a four-hour foray into the bowels of banality. But not quite. A devised show created from 100 hours of recorded telephone conversations and employing its own language of codified gestures, this Unidentified Theater Object, recently seen at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers, explores the strange registers, disabused tones and resigned pragmatism of the uniquely American idiom.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma has nothing whatsoever to do with the state made famous by dust bowls and cowboy folklore . Located in New York City, NTO was created by Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper, who were inspired by the deceptively utopian company of the same name in Franz Kafka’s Amerika. Unlike that enterprise, which drives the final nail into already frustrated immigrant dreams, the folks at NTO seem to have a genuinely inclusive philosophy, which shows in its treatment of audiences (free sandwiches and soda) as well as its approach to the raw matter of drama, which is here the flotsam and jetsam in the flow of everyday life. The show is the second of two works by the company using chance as its guiding principle. The first, “Poetics: A Ballet Brut”, was constructed from silent, random choreography, the movements of which were determined by rolling dice. “No Dice” applies the same chance theory, this time using cards to apply physical punctuation to the mini-dramas (the company calls them “mellowdramas”) recounted in the phone conversations.

Taken as a whole, these exchanges on subjects ranging from diets to dinner-theater, office gossip to auditions, share a common leitmotif revealing their origins in the inherently ego-rocking world of actors looking for work in New York City and paying the bills with day jobs in mind-numbing clerical positions. The show presents five sketchily drawn “characters” in exaggerated get-ups: a grouchy chorus girl in rehearsal attire, a struggling writer sporting pirate booty and Hasidic ringlets dangling from his heavy-rimmed glasses, a non-plussed, paper-pushing cowboy, and the silent presence of a caped rabbit in red basketball shorts and an even more mysterious woman in black jeans, sweatshirt and sunglasses, wearing a Marie Antoinette wig and responsible for some eerie musical accompaniment on electric keyboard. Those who talk also engage in a magnified hand language whose significance grows (somewhat), over time and with each use, not unlike the “insistencies” of Gertrude Stein.

Indeed, with its mundane, repetitive dialogue (riddled with, among other fillers: “yeah”, “u-huh”, “um”, “that’s good”, “anyway”, and its facetious flip-side “anyhoo”), vaguely sketched set and character types, “No Dice” reveals an unacknowledged affinity with the techniques and preoccupations of the “Mother Goose of Montparnasse”, as Stein was known. In other words, what “No Dice” shows, at first glance, is a world of unintelligible codes and equally ambiguous responses to these. If its meaning remains an open question, it clearly develops a meta-commentary on the acting game itself, from theory to daily survival, and is genuinely funny. It also features a fine cast, whose sense of humor carries off the deliberately amateurish acting style and lends a deliciously cruel tone to the events described.

In the absence of more familiar life-buoys, however, it is the language itself that the audience grabs on to: disconcerting in its lack of depth, reassuring in its matter-of-factness, and all the more moving for the failures it describes. “No Dice” is shorthand, of course, for “sorry and too bad for you”, and that kind of outright refusal seems to lie at the core of the exercise: “shit happens” (to use a more recognizable bit of American-ese) and what of it? Life and the show must go on.

Photo Credit: Peter Nigrini