Needcompany in "La Maison des Cerfs"

After “La Chambre d’Isabella” and “Le Bazar du Homard”, it's into the forest – that twilight zone of primordial fears and altered states - with the Needcompany, in a new show “La Maison des cerfs”. In this final piece of the Sad Face/Happy Face trilogy, director Jan Lauwers explores the former side of the coin in a work which takes as its point of departure the death of the brother of a company member: the journalist Kerem Lawton, in Kosovo. Ethical questions of responsibility and involvement in situations of war prompt the story of a mother’s fight to save her family from civil turmoil by retreating to the country. In the style of the Needcompany, however, these preoccupations are mostly deflated by ironic distance, beginning with the sexual play of the show’s opening dressing room scene, which at the same time seeks to approach these very serious issues through the fictional journal of a war photographer.

As in "La Chambre d'Isabella", the set is strewn with an almost inconceivable quantity of objects, here mostly fake deer and their various parts (antlers, countless sets of them). In their pale rubber state, they appear more like formaldehyde specimens than creatures or even hunting trophies, though they also serve in this way as a metaphor for the corpses of the tale, especially in their piling up at show’s end in a kind of anticipated funeral pyre. A certain amount of cliché (a murderous, feuding family) and banality (the mediatized sufferings of war victims), not to mention histrionics, are nevertheless not avoided in the attempted discussion and fictional framing.

For a too brief moment, however, the Needcompany soars as only it can, in the joyous final dance sequence to the music of Hans Petter Dahl and Maarten Seghers. Some of the choreography and movement is riveting, particularly by Eléonore Valère, as the sister searching for her dead brother, while the pair created by Viviane De Muynck, as the mother, and Grace Ellen Barkey as her mentally retarded daughter, is genuinely moving. It seems however that world-weariness is not the Needcompany’s forté and it is to be hoped that they can put the evidently difficult task of remembering a loved one behind them and find a little more joy in their art, which they do so well. Show seen at Théâtre de la Ville.

Photo Credit: Maarten Vanden Abeele

"Moby Dick" by Gare St. Lazare Players Ireland

Irish actor Conor Lovett has so successfully played the protagonists of Samuel Beckett’s fictional world as to seem the incarnation of these wandering dispossessed. But with the first lines of Gare Saint Lazare Players Ireland’s “Moby Dick”, we are ready to call him Ishmael indeed and set sail for uncharted waters under his sure steering. Lovett and his collaborator in life and art, Judy Hegarty, who directs him in all of the company’s Beckett repertory, which includes the acclaimed trilogy “Molloy”, “Malone Dies” and “The Unnamable”, have created from Herman Melville’s masterpiece, a quiet tour de force for a single actor.

While reducing the 700-odd page text to a swift two-hour crossing of Melville’s whirling, eddying tale, Lovett and Hegarty have kept the original language intact throughout. As delivered by Lovett, whose Ishmael is a comically introspective, even squeamish old salt, Melville’s unique idiom keeps us hanging on every word, from the wryly wary description of Ishmael’s insalubrious lodgings (and roommate Queequeg) in New Bedford, Mass., to his awed tableau of the maelstrom with which the cursed Pequod is sucked to its watery grave. Martin Lewis’ musical accompaniment (voice and flute) provides a mariner’s complaint and poetic counterpoint to Ahab’s raving, fanatical quest. You can almost feel the spray break across the bow…

Performed at the Irish Cultural Center, May 7-8. For more information about Gare St. Lazare Players Ireland, visit the company’s website: www.garestlazareplayersireland.com.

"Invasion!"

Words can kill, the saying goes, but language is in constant flux, through ordinary usage and more institutionalized “spin”. If it is no longer possible to use the word “terror”, for example, without evoking George W. Bush’s “war on terror”, it is equally true that language once used to objectify groups is sometimes recuperated by these and used to their advantage. Like “nigga”, now ubiquitous in hip-hop music with both negative and positive connotations, “Abulkasem” is just such a word for Jonas Hassen Khemiri. In “Invasion!” (whose title is loaded with imagery going back to the Crusades), this young playwright of Tunisian and Swedish descent considers how language can color identity, particularly in the case of visible “immigrants” in European societies living in the shadow of 9/11.

From the mists of history to the tough realities of the streets, “Invasion!” imagines how the name of an 18th century corsair could lastingly enter the vocabulary of a group of middle-schoolers, grow with them to become a code word for coolness and from there leap into the media’s projectors when a love-struck, would-be gigolo who has adopted the name, repeatedly leaves it on the voice mail of a political refugee/harvest-picker (whose number he was given by a girl trying to avoid his advances in a bar). Seen and felt on stage in the form of a red ball that swells from the size of a child’s toy to a crushing globe, the snowballing associations of the name develop visibly from a boy’s imaginings to planetary dimensions, but always in the absence of any rhyme or reason. “Abulkasem” becomes Public Enemy #1, hunted by Interpol and the press, without ever managing to settle convincingly on an identifiable individual, except for the harvest-picker: when his “story” is finally unraveled by a translator, he becomes the unwitting victim of ethnocentric fears and anti-terror hysteria.

Director Michel Didym translates effectively to the stage Khemiri’s multi-layered, meta-theatrical text, exploiting video and live music to develop the writing’s different registers, from comedy to satire to psychological horror, and building on an able cast in a variety of quick-changing, cross-dressing roles. Khemiri asks questions from his own experiences, as the “Turk” in the eyes of Swedish society whom he imagines in the bar scene. But he pertinently expands on these to comment on wider perceptions of otherness in our particular historical moment. The much-decried government-defined debate on national identity in France has yet to provoke reactions in French theater but Khemiri’s text, seen at Nanterre, fills for the time being at least a lingering silence.

To April 17, Wed-Sat, 9 pm, Sun, 4 pm, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, 7 avenue Pablo Picasso, Nanterre (92), RER A Nanterre-Préfecture + shuttlebus, 12€-25€, tel: 01.46.14.70.00.

Photo Credit: Eric Didym

"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

Warning to “Streetcar” passengers…

If you were looking to pick up Tennessee Williams’ “Streetcar” at the Théâtre de l’Odéon, you’ll be surprised by the “Tramway” that takes you, not to any Elysian Fields, but to director Krzysztof Warlikowski’s fragmented, stylized and vaguely nightmarish adaptation of Williams’ masterpiece. While any return to the legendary “Streetcar Named Desire”, which earned Williams a Pulitzer (1948) and launched the career of a prowling, virile animal named Marlon Brando, has to contend with those legends and a lingering iconography (one reviewer of this production got excited over actor Andrzej Chyra’s “tee-shirt à la Marlon Brando”), Warlikowski’s freestyle make-over of such a finely constructed text as this gives cause for wonder, especially when the results are as dissatisfying as these.

Not content to merely truncate the original, Warlikowski goes boldly in the opposite direction, adding close to an hour of “reflections” on Williams’ themes, drawing from texts as disparate as letters written by Gustav Flaubert, an interview with jazz singer Eartha Kitt, Sophocles’ “Oedipus at Colonus” and St. Matthew’s Gospel, not to mention four utterly didactic musical selections, including Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself” (1975). Letting a great work speak for itself seems impossible for Warlikowski here.

Moreover, the interpretation he brings is a gross simplification of William’s preoccupations with illusion/reality/disillusion and the replacement of romantic antebellum codes of conduct by a self-made proletarian individualism. Sex is the only point of reference here, beginning with Blanche’s clear depiction as a whore: seated on a stool, legs spread, in a black negligee, facing a glass wall. Played by Isabelle Huppert as a washed-out party girl (and whose gorgeous wardrobe, furnished by Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior, is a too tempting, over-exaggeration of the faded ball gowns Blanche desperately recycles into service), she begs nor earns neither our pity nor our sympathy. Stella (Florence Thomassin) is a trash calendar pin-up to Chyra’s merely cruel Stanley (an incongruous casting error, given Warlikowski’s chosen emphasis). The cast is rounded out by a skinheaded, kick-boxing Mitch and the neighbor lady Eunice (Renate Jett) who doubles as the lounge act, on a slick and shiny, retractable set that is simultaneously bowling alley, bathroom and bedroom, filmed in real-time and projected behind the action.

In short, too much going on and not enough of what matters. For a production that cost as much as this one obviously did, the only thing Warlikowski gets right is the excess that finally burned Williams out.

"Un Tramway", to April 3, Tues-Sat, 8 pm, Sun, 3 pm, Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, Place de l’Odéon, 6e, Mº Odéon, 18€-32€, tel: 01.44.85.40.40.

Photo Credit: Pascal Victor/ArtComArt

Tori no tobu takasa

The defective brakes recall that has torpedoed Toyota Corporation delivers an ironic punch line to “Tori no tobu takasa”, the tale of a family-owned toilet seat manufacturer’s struggle to join the global economy. Trading a merely model product for sexy marketing, the Saruwatari company aspires to pamper the derrieres of all of Asia, but loses its integrity in the process. This Sino-French production of Michel Vinaver’s landmark play about France’s collision with free enterprise in the 1960s, “Par-dessus bord”, is adapted by the Japanese playwright Oriza Hirata and directed by a passionate reader of both, Arnaud Meunier. The largely satisfying results show however, in the parlance of Vinaver’s play, that “extending the product” may require eliminating some “clutter” for “profit potential” to be “maximized”.

“Par-dessus bord” is a detailed study (in four versions of varying lengths) of how French business was transformed in the 1960s by American corporate practices, written by someone who lived these changes from the inside (Vinaver was the CEO of Gillette France at the time) and who saw in these the makings of Aristophanic dramatic structure and comedy. “Tori no tobu takasa” follows faithfully the six movements of Vinaver’s text, changing only toilet paper for toilet seats and Yankee ad men for Parisian “consultants marketing”. A third modification, concerning a subplot around a “mixed” couple, replaces the young Jewish lover with a Rwandan exile.

Despite the incongruousness of this latter change (unlike French Jews, assimilated Africans are an exception in Japanese society) and the didacticism it generates, as well as the lengthy parallel between mythological and modern Japan (the nuances of which are difficult to capture for the uninitiated to Japanese origin stories, who also have to read subtitles), this contemporary ride on the roller coaster of the market economy remains fast and funny. The multicultural project marshals the resources of an abundant crew and cast, who, like so many legions of Tokyo commuters, crisscross the stage in perpetual motion: moving the set, singing and dancing for the glory of toilet seats, and, most of all, incarnating with wry humor Saruwatari’s furiously busy employees and their smoothly clever French associates.

Oriza Hirata is the leading playwright of his generation in Japan, the founder of the Seinendan company and the theory behind the “quiet theater” movement of the 1990s, which seeks inspiration in contemporary Japanese society and carries a meticulous acting methodology. Somewhat like Vinaver’s straddling of business and theater, Hirata is developing the field of “communication design”, meant to facilitate through architecture and interior clues, the exchange of information between doctors and lawyers on the one hand, and their patients and clients, on the other. As the set sheds its bare wooden walls and patriotic red offices in favor of modular spaces and the shimmering blues of computer screens, Hirata’s interests appear fully connected to the subject at hand. The Japanese are the uncontested world experts when it comes to toilet technology and comfort, but that it would take French marketing savvy in the areas of beauty and bien-être to sell seats in 2009 satisfyingly explains the cultural transfers from the original. As Saruwatari makes room for French investors by pushing faithful employees out the door, the future looks a little too bright and the promises made about ensuring “Japanese” quality above all sound deliberately hollow. A lesson that Toyota is learning the hard way, as are the clients of global markets all around the world, every day.

In French and Japanese, with French subtitles. To Feb. 20, Tues-Sat, 8:30 pm, Théâtre des Abbessess, 31 rue des Abbesses, 18e, M° Abbesses, 12€-23€, tel: 01.42.74.22.77.

Photo credit: Théâtre de la Ville

Littoral

Burying a father is never a painless affair but in Wajdi Mouawad’s “Littoral”, the task takes on epic proportions, intersecting family secrets and civil war to lend universal dimensions to a personal tragedy. The play, written in 1991, and its new production, recounts a homecoming of sorts, for its protagonist as well as for this Montreal-based, Lebanese playwright and director; Mouawad returns to this early piece, 15 years after writing it as an unemployed theater post-grad, rehearsing simultaneously, in his living room, with props borrowed from the kitchen. “Littoral” is the first work of the tetralogy composed also of “Incendies”, “Forêts” and “Ciels”, and exploits themes common to all of these: missing parents, lost family histories, war and (re)constructed identities, but from a lightly juvenile point of view that translates into physical humor and poetic flights that can teeter between funny and crude or slow down the action, but beg an irresistible sympathy.

The story centers on a rather immature Wilfrid, who juts out his lower lip and stamps his foot when he is contradicted, and his gradual weaning from two powerful father figures. For the genitor he never knew, he must first piece together the story of his parents’ relationship before he can finally bury the man who abandoned him as an infant. In the absence of his biological father, Wilfrid has also created an imaginary hero to save him from his personal bogeymen: the Chevalier Guiromelan, with whom he must at last also part company to finally integrate the adult world. This voyage of self-discovery leads all three men/phantoms to the father’s birthplace and a rude confrontation with greater problems yet: the strife and upheaval caused by civil war there. The grieving Wilfrid finds comfort on the way in the other adult children he meets, also seeking catharsis with dead parents; when his quest to bury his father is shouldered by all, it brings closure to the sufferings of many more than he could ever have imagined.


Despite certain challenges with which the young writer evidently struggled (primarily, how to finally dispose of the father’s corpse on stage), this new production is easily carried by its multicultural cast which exuded an infectious energy on a recent night, led by the opposing comic touches brought by Patrick Le Mauff as the self-effacing father and Jean Alibert as the combative Guiromelan. The simple yet inventive set of wooden walls draped in black plastic can be body bags and coffin liners, but, turned over, becomes sand dunes and the seaside horizon of the play’s title. Mouawad also makes striking use of a painter's palette to underscore in dripping strokes of white, red and blue the play's themes of death, sacrifice and redemption. “Littoral” is a place of new beginnings and a return to old ones as well, and in this way an interesting complement to last season’s autobiographic “Seuls”, which Mouawad wrote, directed and acted. After presiding over the 2009 Festival d’Avignon, Mouawad’s writing brings a welcome current of multicultural self-exploration to French theater.

To Feb. 21, Wed, Thurs, 7:30 pm, Fri, Sat, 8:30 pm, Sun, 4 pm, Théâtre 71, 3 place du 11 Novembre, Malkoff (92), M° Malakoff-Plateau de Vanves, 11€ -23€, tel: 01.55.48.91.00.

Photo Credit: Jean-Louis Fernandez