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Avant GardArama

Five Shorts Spell One Night to Savor

review by Robert Hurwitt, SF Chronicle October 19, 2004

 

Her ice box is long gone, the friendly woman putting up beets in tightly sealed jars explains. "But I got something better," she adds. "Memory of the ice box, so much better than the real thing."

The tension between the real and the imaginary, the visible and the unseen haunts the five short experimental pieces that make up "Avant Gardarama! " -- the Cutting Ball offering that opened Friday at the Exit Theatre. Airplanes flirt with stewardesses. A professor collects great catastrophes in a little box. Nothing else, though, has the resonance and gathering chill of the woman named Miss Miss in Suzan-Lori Parks' compact and evocative "Pickling. "

There are other high points in the program, a sampling of such leading experimenters as Richard Foreman, Heiner Müller and Mac Wellman. "Fighter Airplanes" -- created from Foreman's notebooks by Cutting founder Rob Melrose -- is a rare chance to see a Foreman text stripped of his mesmerizing Ontological-Hysteric Theater production values.

This is Foreman without the master's rich, suggestively cluttered set installation, layered soundscape and choreographed repetitions. What remains is an intriguing, fraught flirtation between two boyishly macho American fighter jets (James Craft and Ryan Oden) -- appallingly unaware of the human effect of their actions -- and two sexy, life-affirming French "stewardesses" (the Foreman-ish stylized Danielle O'Hare and Jessa Santens).

Müller's "Ajax, for Instance" (translated by Carl Weber) is a multilayered train-of-thought meditation about the betrayals of Sophocles' Greek hero filtered through those of modern tyrants (Hitler, Stalin) and the ravages of commercialism -- a bit too murky in Melrose's staging and David Sinaiko's quirky performance. Melrose's own "Helen of Troy" is an at times engaging, thoughtful but unevenly acted triptych on Helen, her lovers and her dimly remembered father (evoked in Michael Locher's swan-theme set), graced by O'Hare's finely tuned Helen.

Parks' richly poetic language raises the evening to new heights in Jaxy Boyd's beautifully measured, subtly nuanced Miss Miss. "Pickling," expertly paced by Melrose, is deceptively complex beneath a simple surface -- as is Miss Miss, the proud, gently opinionated, sweet-singing woman saving every scrap of food, and many other things, in the jars on her shelves.

The contents of the jars -- beets, milk, a song, a laugh, an intimate memento -- combine with double-edged words ("steel" and "steal") and reflections on her neighbors to segue from comic monologue to mystery to chilling revelations about the human heart. It's the most complex and complete play on the bill.

Melrose closes with Wellman's clever "The Sandalwood Box," with its "vitrified catastrophes" in a Brooklyn rain forest and some particularly sharp work by Sinaiko and Santens. It's a nice capper to a pretty good sample of cutting-edge texts. Now, if only somebody could finally get it together to bring one of Foreman's productions to the Bay Area.

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