Tuesday, October 31, 2006
vewy scawy
It was ok--clearly a ton of work and money had been poured into it and there was lots of animatronic spectacle. As I walked through it, though, I realized that a haunted house requires two different types of scary:
1. People jumping out saying "boo!" and making you yelp; and
2. The witnessing of horrifying, terrifying things.
Our theater department in high school held an annual Haunted House as a fundraiser--I seem to recall on year, there was a scene in which we walk into a couple's intimate bedroom and watch one of the pair get sweet-talked, then horribly axed (strangled?) by the other. I mean, Hell House might be a bizarre Christian fundamentalist artifact, but at least they show souls suffering in hell, people committing suicide, others dying on the abortion table. Now that's some scary shit. That's theater right there.
Pirates was long on the "boos!", short on the actual creepy darkness reaching into your soul performance.
It certainly was no Face Your Fears Haunted House, directed by Timothy Haskell, in which they polled New Yorkers about what they feared the most, and then created five distinct, borough specific houses. (Apparently, Manhattenites fear clowns, Bronxites fear homelessness).
Strange simultaneity--just the day before I saw HIGH SCHOOL, a production at Berkeley High created in collaboration with Antenna Theater, in which you walk through the school with audio tour headphones on, hearing the voices of the students. I think the live action could have been further integrated and elaborated upon, and I thought the physical design elements a bit weak (though a few of the puppets and masks were gorgeous)--sadly, just the simplicity of walking through the geography with that soundscape informing what you see, so precisely synced, and relinquishing your control and being commanded through--that was such a dreamlike, pleasurable experience--the live action seemed a bit superfluous.
Monday, October 30, 2006
Unto These Hills--Updated!
In June, I wrote about the recent big changes happening at Unto These Hills, an outdoor drama in Cherokee, NC. They were finally updating the racist 50-year old script.
This weekend, I received a thorough, measured review of the new production by Keith Best, a former cast member of the old show, who also blogs at Castle of Stink. He currently teaches at Francis Marion University in South Carolina.
(It makes me feel so excited to get this email--like I have a network of spies nationally to see plays and slip me information. Please, if I really have any readers, send me things like this! Blogging is awesome!)
Perhaps I have to set up the context of Outdoor Dramas and their general set of techniques and storytelling style a little more before you know why this is so very interesting, but I don't have time. This is long, but it's my blog, and I think it's fascinating, so there! I'm putting Keith in italics--bold emphasis is mine.
Generally, he descrbes the play as "non-traditional"
...sort of a spectacle-driven, surrealistic, postmodern, deconstructionist view of the old script...
With a greater emphasis on dance
...birds, eagle dance, hoop dance...some of them are certainly spectacular. Lots of lighting effects, sound effects, costumes. The dances seem to have a base of traditional native American footwork, but then contemporary modern movement is added on top of that.
The play structure?
...retained a very basic structure from the old Kermit Hunter script, but just barely.
It seems like they sliced the old script to ribbons, and maintained as major characters only the two Cherokee leads, Kenati and Selu. In Act I, serving as narrators, they tromp through the action of the old story and
are outside of the action of the story when it is told, with a few exceptions. Given that any other characters in the play appear for only a few moments, there is no one character with whom the audience can identify.
This choice is interesting because it becomes a play about the Cherokee experience (somewhat) as told from the Cherokee point-of-view--therefore, we don't see Major Davis, but the native-American representation of
This juxtaposition is interesting, but it bothered me that the representation of
Act I ends with the Trail of Tears:
The intermission came in the middle of what would have been the old scene 12 climax. We get a Trail of Tears told in tableau style, so there is a sense of the entire trail rather than just the beginning, but there are no characters to which we've established a connection, so it's more like an interactive museum display than a dramatic presentation...
Granted this isn't traditional storytelling, but if the Trail of Tears should be the climax of the show, then it bothers me that the climax is interrupted by the intermission. I'm sure it's Hanay’s writing/directorial choice, but it’s a very Brechtian one.
This is followed by a local young Cherokee, Alyssa Sampson, sing a cappela. It is:
the purest emotional moment of the show...it connects the sorrow of the people with the tragedy of the Trail of Tears.
After that, the "play" or "narrative" is finished:
The rest of act two is basically a celebration in dance and music. We see traditional Cherokee costumes onstage, and then cast members slowly appear on stage in modern clothes. The mixture of the "new day, old day" is lovely, but this convention seems out of place without having been introduced earlier in the show and is likely to confuse this audience....It feels like a different show now.
...there is a hoedown and a hoop dance mixing all these time periods together...the hoop dance was basically traditional, though not particularly good hoop dancing--it was almost a stylized eagle dance with hoops held on the shoulders like wings—and was done under black lights...It probably didn't help that one of the dancers was stumbling and had difficulty with timing, though he clearly knew the choreography. Still, though, there seemed to be a lot of joy and fun in these performances in the second half...
Dream-like, in fact, is a good description of the "feel" for the whole show. Pacing was really slow (annoyingly so, at times). I can't imagine this slow pacing wasn't a directorial choice, but for the most part, the performers lacked the energy and presence to maintain a slow pace without it seeming "lazy."