Tim Minchin and Dennis Kelly | Matilda / 2013

loud and quiet

by Douglas Messerli

Tim Minchin (music and lyrics), Dennis Kelly (book), Matilda / New York, Sam S. Schubert Theatre, the performance I attended as a matinee on May 5, 2013

 

The most surprising theatrical experience of this year was provided by the British musical Matilda, based on Roald Dahl’s children’s book. Long before the musical opened and was heaped with praise from The New York Times reviewer, Ben Brantley (“Matilda…is the most satisfying and subversive musical ever to come out of Britain”), I had ordered tickets and was looking forward to enjoying it. Along with Kinky Boots it has garnered since the highest number of Tony award nominations.

 

     The set, consisting of a series of lettered blocks cascading across the stage and into the audience space, was quite innovative, and all the technical aspects of this work, particularly the lighting, was well done. And who wouldn’t love the ridiculously mean child-hater, Miss Trunchbull (played in drag by the excellent Bertie Carvel), the absurdly mindless Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood (Leslie Margherita and Gabriel Ebert) and their brain dead son, Michael (Taylor Trensch). The choruses of urchin dancers put their collective talents in high gear through singing and dancing, and little Oona Lawrence (playing the role of Matilda in the performance I witnessed) was charmingly able and cute. The audience, filled with overweight girls whose parents think it their responsibility to stock each of them with sacks of candies to be crunched throughout the play, absolutely loved it. So why didn’t I?

       Was I turning into an old curmudgeon, I pondered mid-way through the first act, the likes of which I’ve always promised myself I would never become. At the intermission, however, the couple next to me, seasoned theater-goers, so I had discerned from our pre-curtain discussions, quietly asked me what I thought about the work. I paused, not wanting to staunch anyone’s joy of the performance. “We don’t like it at all,” she quietly confided. “I even thought we should go home during intermission” added her husband. And I admitted, for the first time in my life, that I to had just resisted doing the same thing. So began the second act, which continued much as the first—for me an utterly joyless and rote playing out of the ridiculous fairytale about a little girl who is punished for being smart, a kind of coy expression of the problem intelligent children are imagined to have to face in the contemporary world.

      Part of the problem was simply the mumbling of the mostly British cast (Brantley did warn of this). Accordingly, it was often simply hard to understand the lyrics of the basically tuneless songs, although I perceived a kind of mild cleverness in the lyrics nonetheless, particularly if you delight in children admitting to their “naughtiness.” Having perceived that problem in expression, perhaps, the director turned up the volume, as if we were all hard of hearing. In fact in the 7th song of act one, the singers note that issue precisely in the number “Loud,” and in the final act Matilda herself observes, momentarily at least, that things have grown “Quiet,” alas the third song from the last.       

     Accompanying these “loud” pastiches, each of which sound, like so much contemporary theater music, as if they were created by a machine programmed to connect the dots, are the well-intentioned dances which both children and adults perform as if they have been robotized. While they certainly leap about with great energy, there seems to be no joy in their gyrations. Only the Wormwoods, she with her dancing partner Rudolpho (Phillip Spaeth), he in his rubbery legged motions within striped lime-green pants, seem to have any “choreographical” fun. But they are given only few painful moments to display their obviously insignificant and totally selfish “gestures.”

     Matilda, whether she is telling “loudly voiced” (at times even shouted) stories to her local and saintly librarian or suffering the attacks of Miss Trunchbull and her own family members, almost gets abused out of existence. The only moment, until the musical lurches to its suddenly happy end, that she is allowed to express any joy is when the tender Miss Honey asks to be her friend, to which she responds with a big hug. Beyond that, she is just a figurehead, a brilliant young girl at whom nearly everyone else yells in derision, as they might a bullied “nerd.” Even poor Annie, of the musical of that name, got more love and attention from her evil headmistress, than does Matilda.

     It is not, however, that Matilda, as its makers have argued, is a “dark” work, as much as it is an empty one. While Annie, at least, had “tomorrow” to look forward, Matilda is amazingly unflappable, committed to her reading and thinking as mindlessly as Miss Trunchbull is committed to her hate and torture of her young students. Despite their thoughtless machinations, I think I’d prefer to live with the Wormwoods than with the fantasy-spinning, slightly holier-than-everyone Matilda. But, obviously, there is no living with anyone in this tale, since each character is nothing more than a cardboard, cartoonish type. Even the gentle Miss Honey lives out life in a shed instead of a house, as if her whole world has been miniaturized and flattened. Like everyone here she is a “thin” character, without dimension. Only Miss Trunchbull, ensconced her in ill-gotten mansion, has any “bulk,” yet she’s more fun than everyone else put together, despite her utterly unsociable demeanor.

     Indeed, despite the work’s pretense of siding with the small and quiet Matilda, this musical advocates the loud and large—which may hint why all the girls both in front and back of me as well as latitudinally seated, watched throughout with sacks of candy on their laps. Having seen the movie or read the book, did they comprehend that fat was better than thin, loud better than quiet?

     So desperate to be loved was Dennis Kelly’s and Tim Minchin’s work, that at one moment near the work’s end, the stage suddenly burst out—apparently in response to the downfall of Miss Trunchbull—into a shower of strobe lights, while green lasers shot out across the ceiling of the uncomfortable Schubert balcony. “Awesome,” shouted out a child in the audience, one of the few truly spontaneous moments in this determined parable! It was at that point I had to admit to myself that this was simply not a work created for the likes of me—nor for my two dazed neighbors, who together with me made our way grumpily back into the crowded mid-town streets.

      “Why do you think,” asked the wife, “this got such remarkably positive reviews?” “I don’t know,” I responded, “but it might have something to do with the fact that this has not exactly been a particularly stellar Broadway season. Reviewers have to like something.” Two more plays closed the next day, but am I sure that Matilda will play on for years!

 

Los Angeles, May 9, 2013

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (June 2013).

 

Back to Back Theatre Group | Ganesh Versus the Third Reich / 2013

playing the play

Back to Back Theatre Group Ganesh Versus the Third Reich / performed by Mark Deans, Simon Laherty, Scott Price, Brian Tilley and Luke Ryan / Los Angeles, UCLA Freud Playhouse / the performance I saw as a matinee on Sunday, January 27, 2013

The Geelong, Australia Back to Back Theatre Group, according to their own description, “creates new forms of contemporary theatre imagined from the minds and experiences of a unique ensemble of actors with a disability, giving voice to the social and political issues that speak to all people.” Certainly, those are lofty goals, but one does have to question the “all.” Can anything speak to “all” or even attempt to. The two elderly women who sat next to me yesterday afternoon had no idea what they were about to see, and were quite visibly disturbed when, late into the play, the actor also playing the director of the work (Luke Ryan), lashed out at the audience sitting in the first rows for “coming to see a freak show,” although he mollified them some by claiming he always imagined the first few rows of the theater as empty. The production I saw was sold out!

      Moreover, this is a work which requires the audience attend, that they listen closely just to hear some of the disabled, Australian actors’ words—sometimes slurred with heavy “down under” accents—and mentally make large metaphorical connections as well as accept a work that might be seen as morally reprehensible to some. Indeed, when the company first conceived of a story in which the great Indian Ganesh, the elephant-headed “mover of obstacles” visits Adolph Hitler and Joseph Mengele to retrieve the Hindu swastika symbol, they themselves felt it might be inappropriate to combine such a “fairytale” within the holocaust.

       In the end, however, Ganesh Versus the Third Reich is less about the meeting of the ancient God with the monstrous Nazi leader that in is a work dealing the attempts of this group to create and accomplish such an audacious piece of theater. Four of the actors have difficulty with language, and one, Mark Deans, has trouble in even expressing himself, often confusing the experience of the performance with reality. Brian Tilley, playing the elephant-god, strongly questions the effectiveness or even propriety of his performance. The young actor playing both a Jewish prisoner and, later, Hitler, Simon Laherty, is often timid to take on such unlikely roles. Scott Price emphatically feels the whole play is a terrible mistake, lashing out at the work’s “director” and the rest of the cast. But gradually we begin to see parallels, not so much in the story, but in relation to the large issues of power and control, along with Nazi Dr. Megele’s real-life fascination with what he would described as “degenerates.”

      Ryan, who The New York Times critic Ben Brantley described as a “handsome and well-spoken man” (i.e., apparently not mentally challenged) alone sees the importance of presenting this play, coaxing his often recalcitrant company with praise and pep-talks, only to finally give up in complete frustration after Price refuses to fall correctly upon being “shot,” a scene which ends in all-out battle between him and the others, closing down the play.

    Appearing most of the time only in silk running shorts, as if to show off his physique, Ryan is caring and protective at the same time he is his glib and domineering. Although he is a force behind the production, he is also part of the reason for the company’s own doubts, a kind of friendly bully who, although sympathetic to their difficulties, is also impatient and sometimes outright abusive. Although the members might often virulently argue with each other, they give one another supportive hugs after brutal interchanges, working as a unit in their achievements. In short, they do precisely what any theater company must do if they are to attain an effective performance, only here the effect is the opposite of the naturalistic or theatrically coherent performances most of us would define as “great theater.” Here it is the differences, the friction, the interruptions, even the holes in the work that matter far more than the absolute credibility to which most of Western theater generally aspires.

      This fascinating work ends, in fact, with a character playing a child’s game—which I would argue is perhaps at the very heart of any theater (as a child I used to ask other children to “play play” with me, resulting, often, in a good scolding by some adults for my seeming baby talk)—when the angry “director” leaves Deans and the others “to take a swim,” asking him to play “hide-and-seek,” so that he can escape. Deans hides, quite predictably, beneath a table, but when no one comes to find him, grows restless, laying down to pretend to sleep, rising again, returning to the crouch with which he began. Like a trapped animal, he is confused, tired, impatient, but still continues to participate in the “play” of the game. When the lights go out, he is the first up for a well-deserved bow to the applauding audience, and, after the others take their bows, raises his arms in joy once more to take all that applause in!

      And yes, we realize, that does somehow represent us all. We all want to be appreciated for the theater of the self we every day create, even if the acts we undertake cannot be as heroic as we might have desired.

 

Los Angeles, January 28, 2013

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2013)

Henry Purcell and Nahum Tate | Dido and Aeneas / 2014

hello, i must be going

by Douglas Messerli

 

Henry Purcell (music), Nahum Tate (libretto), Dido and Aeneas / LAOpera, Los Angeles, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the production I attended was a matinee on November 2, 2014

 

Henry Purcell’s lovely Baroque opera, first performed in the summer of 1688, was probably part of the annual spring celebrations at Priest’s boarding school for women. The work represents Purcell’s only “traditional” opera—if we define the tradition to be the kind uninterrupted musical theater that developed later through Handel, and the dominant forms of the genre in the 18th and 19th centuries. Certainly, after Dido and Aeneas Purcell did not abandon writing for theater, but the musical forms he worked in were so-called “semi-operas,” music mixed with speech.

 

    After seeing an high-definition, live broadcast of the Met’s Bizet’s Les troyens just last year, in which the relationship between Dido and Aeneas  played out over the last two long acts of the work, during which, much of the time, the two languidly lay, embracing upon a huge, multi-pillowed bed, the LAOpera production, based on the Frankfurt Opera version directed by Barrie Kosky, seems so-attenuated in its hour of performance time, that we hardly get a chance to actually realize that the two have consummated their sudden love before the hero, most emphatically, trots back to Italy, slamming the door behind him, a bit like Ibsen’s Nora.

     Everything in Purcell’s representation of the tragic romance is theatrically played out before the entire court, within the kind of frontal friezes that that might remind one more of gestural early human-scapes of Boris Godunov than a jaunt into the local countryside Tate’s libretto calls for. Indeed, the first scenes are played out in this version of the Purcell work on a long bench upon which the entire cast is seated beside Dido (Paula Murrihy) as she cries out in her suffering for her desires to embrace of the new conqueror, Aeneas (Liam Bonner). No sooner has the beautiful Carthaginian queen declared that “Peace and I are strangers grown,” than her maid Belinda (Kateryna Kasper) reassures her that Aeneas shares her passion and agitates for a marriage between the two royals, despite Dido’s reservations. And almost as quickly as she and others have joined in their court-wide blessing, all rush to hill and dale to celebrate—with the Kosky production suggesting in the secondaries’ behavior and—at least in two cases—their in-the-buff attire, wilder goings-on than that original young boarding school girls might have ever imagined. Although Purcell’s opera makes little to-do about the Dido-Aeneas romance—a brief scene of flirtation and a couple of short kisses representing their formal introduction to each other—we surely recognize that something far more serious has occurred between the two lovers than a simple sharing of a picnic and hunt.

     Even these seemingly uneventful festivities, however, are quickly interrupted by distant thunder, the sound of which is first picked up with the already suspicious Dido, who, along with Belinda, encourages the entire court to scurry back to the castle (“Haste, haste to town.”). Dido might well fear for those claps of thunder, for, as we already have been shown, through the meeting of the Sorceress and her two witchy comrades within a nearly cave (the marvelously comic trio of the large-framed Black countertenors John Holiday, G. Thomas Allen, and Darryl Taylor), evil plans are being hatched to destroy the Queen and her city both; and soon after, Aeneas is accosted by Mercury’s spirit demanding that he return, as he promised Jove, to rebuild Troy. 

     Even these seemingly uneventful festivities, however, are quickly interrupted by distant thunder, the sound of which is first picked up with the already suspicious Dido, who, along with Belinda, encourages the entire court to scurry back to the castle (“Haste, haste to town.”). Dido might well fear for those claps of thunder, for, as we already have been shown, through the meeting of the Sorceress and her two witchy comrades within a nearly cave (the marvelously comic trio of the large-framed Black countertenors John Holiday, G. Thomas Allen, and Darryl Taylor), evil plans are being hatched to destroy the Queen and her city both; and soon after, Aeneas is accosted by Mercury’s spirit demanding that he return, as he promised Jove, to rebuild Troy.

     As attractive as Aeneas may appear to both Dido and the audience, he is clearly dunderhead when it comes to love, worrying more about how we find the words to explain his decision to choose duty over his just-consumed relationship. That other great African explorer, Captain Spaulding of the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers assertively proclaimed the sentiment now so perplexing the young Aeneas in the Kalmar-Ruby song, “Hello, I Must Be Going.” Margaret Dumont, however, was no Dido; and Aeneas surely realizes that his leaving can only end in her death. Accordingly, despite the fact that she has heard the rumors of the Trojan men preparing to weigh anchor (“Come away, fellow soldiers”), Aeneas attempts to placate the queen by lying.

     Dido reacts with scorn to his hypocritical declaration that he has decided to remain, declaring that even having thought of leaving her has already betrayed her—as indeed he has! Given her insistence that he now leave her, Kosky’s Aeneas, as I have suggested, plays it almost comically, rushing off just as abruptly as he has previously arrived in Dido’s court. 

    There has indeed been something about his speedy comings and goings that, along with the abbreviated story the opera tells, Tate’s plot dooms any fruition of the sentiment that its characters might have felt. And in that sense, Purcell’s tuneful garden-party-like opera suddenly becomes something far-more dangerous and threatening, as if its central character has not only been frightened by a clap of thunder but by the specter of a snake swallowing its own tail.

      And so, quite naturally, Purcell’s work end as it begin, with Dido singing of her fears upon her long bench-like throne. But this time she is not accompanied by the entire court, but stands and sits alone, singing now not just her doubts, but regrets, which gradually converge into a dirge for her own death, “When I am laid in Earth.”

 

     Despite the seeming lightness of Purcell’s work, which doubtlessly led Kosky to wrap his production within so many comic-like moments—and apart from the sometimes comic-book-like series of friezes with which the composer and his librettist encapsulate the abbreviated adventures of their heroes—the opera, finally, is transformed from a display of vernal gavottes into a dance of death.

     Purcell’s music beautifully reveals this transformation, gently shifting throughout the last scene from fury, to pain and sorrow, and, finally, to silence and death. Unfortunately, Kosky, evidently unable to figure out a way to help his Dido attain the same shifts in character as she fluctuates between these emotions, forces Murrihy to cry out in spasms of what is evidently meant to represent internal pain, turning the final tragic moments of Purcell’s work into a kind grand Guignol-like travesty as utters what first might appear to be sobs that turn into gurgles of vomiturition In the beginning, these simply make the audience a bit uncomfortable, but they finally leave us with a deep sense of embarrassment at the very moment when tears might instead be welling up beneath our eyes. As a young man standing near me intoned to his friend during the intermission: “I thought she’d never die!”   

     I’ll forgive such an overall graceful production, however, that rather serious flaw. And Purcell’s music, under the direction of Steven Sloane, stood up to the test, charming every one of us again.

 

Los Angeles, November 3, 2014

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2014).

David Javerbaum | An Act of God / 2016

divine lite

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Javerbaum An Act of God / Los Angeles, the Ahmanson Theatre. The performance I saw was on February 10, 2016

 

I don’t know what has happened to my sense of humor. At Sean Hayes’ pleasant but also somewhat aggravating performance last night of David Javerbaum’s An Act of God, the audience in the near-to-capacity Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles seemed absolutely delighted with what being said, laughing, sometimes quite boisterously, upon cue throughout the play, while I sat on the aisle stone-faced. Certainly, it’s not that I don’t have a long-lens perspective when it comes to anything religious. As I’ve written elsewhere in these pages, I gave up without any religious convictions that I may have had years ago, and any “god” I might today envision has very little do with the Judeo-Christian one which this play joyfully parodied.

 

      Perhaps it’s simply that I don’t watch enough television, particularly television comedies, and, accordingly, the stream of lame one-liners that this confection proffered up, just wasn’t—to use what today has almost become a political metaphor—my cup of tea. I mean, come on, shouldn’t I be able to chortle over a god who admits that he has nothing against gays, lesbians, transsexuals, or any other sexuality?; who reveals the fact that the first couple upon earth were actually Adam and Steve, not Adam and Eve? It was all that phallic snake’s fault, who, after feeding them that apple, made them feel as if they’d sinned, that cast them out their gay paradise.

     If the Coen brothers can mock Job, the endless sufferer, why shouldn’t this good-spirited god find the whole story a hoot? And here, for the first time in the history of Judaism and Christianity (although this god, in his seeming pantheism, seems a bit closer to Zeus; Mary is certainly not deified in this comic portrayal) admit that everything in the Good Book should be taken quite so literally. As he explains, there simply would not been enough room on the ark for Noah to have taken two of each earthly animal along on the voyage, let alone to carry the various kinds of food necessary to feed them all; and where might Noah have ever found two of each those beasts?

 

     And who mightn’t like a god who’s fed up with everybody taking his name in “vain,’ thanking him for anything and everything they have achieved on their own: “Kanye, next time you win the Grammy Award and you thank me for your ‘God-given talents,’ they’re going to get God-taken, understand?” And this god seems spot-on in his observation that there’s something perverse about a child, laying down to sleep, praying “if I should die before I wake.”

      Indeed this good natured fellow was kind of fed-up with the centuries of human misunderstanding regarding his Ten Commandments and other teachings, realizing through this TV-like talk appearance that there is “something seriously wrong with me.” And by the end of the evening, god is perfectly willing to let us folk go our own way and to stop relying on him. He doesn’t even answer all our prayers, let alone can he explain the Holocaust, the Flood, and his insistence that Abraham sacrifice his son. I mean this is a god who has obviously gone through therapy (even if it’s only self-therapy) and is perfectly able to confess that he’s not always very nice—which, of course, makes us like him all the more! It’s hard not to believe in such a jovial fellow. Certainly the audience did, applauding his march right up the stairway to heaven—beautifully conceived, I must admit, by scenic designer Scott Pask.

 

     So what’s my problem? Why couldn’t I laugh along with all the others? It’s not easy to explain, but I guess even in my disbelief I take true belief more seriously than the well-dressed heathens who made up this audience. I mean, even as this user-friendly god points out, terrible things have been allowed to happen in the name of the Christian god, so terrible that’s it’s not so simple to just forgive and forget as he might command. And every day others who can’t or won’t give him up go on cooking up more terrible things to do for those of us who can’t or won’t believe in Him. And after all, this is just one “god.” What about all the others?

      So frankly, it’s hard for me to believe in a PC god, who just wants to be loved, even for one night. Why is it funny to dish what so many deeply believe in, when the belief itself can continue to be so destructive to all?

     Oh come-on I can hear you saying, “lighten up!” Even this god seems a little amused by the constant suffering of his son—not his only child evidently. But then, that has always been the big problem for me: I was never touched by the divine lite.

 

Los Angeles, February 11, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2016)

     

 

Kirk Lynn | The Method Gun / 2011

approaching the real

by Douglas Messerli

Kirk Lynn The Method Gun, created and performed by the Rude Mechs / Culver City, California: Kirk Douglas Theater / the performance I attended was on June 14, 2011

In their play The Method Gun the Austin-based collaborative Rude Mechanicals has created a delightful theatrical work that combines satire, whimsy, history, and naturalist theater in a way that few works today have attempted.

     The subject, or one might say the missing center of their work, is a drama teacher, Stella Burden, with whom the five players of The Method Gun had long worked—that is until she suddenly disappeared into Ecuador or Paraguay.

    Actress Hannah Kenah explains to the audience at the play's start, that her Rude Mechs company had found play texts, lesson books, films, and interviews about Stella Burden and her method—nicknamed the "The Approach"— in libraries and other locations near Austin. And, by coincidence, a grant led one of their members to Ecuador, where Stella was evidently last spotted.

    As early as August 14, 2006, the company posted a Stella Burden site, explaining that they were "conducting research" for The Method Gun to create "a fictional biography and a theatrical production tracing the life and tragic death of Stella Burden (a.k.a. "the other Stella"), the "other" obviously referencing Stella Adler, whose "Studio of Acting" helped to make famous "The Method" of the Stanislavski system.

     The work that the Rude Mechs created centers on those five remaining students (Carl Reyholt, Connie Torrey, Koko Bond, Robert "Hops" Gilbert, and Elizabeth Johns), now without a leader, but attempting to keep their company together in an interminable rehearsal of several years (based on Burden's own methods) of a production of A Streetcar Named Desire—without the major characters of Blanche, Stanley, Stella, and Mitch. We experience, accordingly, the company's reenactment of some of Stella Burden's principles, most notably on "how to cry" and "how to kiss," the company members' squabbles, sexual interrelations, fears, doubts, and later, questionable fame for being the last students of Burden, as they are interviewed, filmed, and trotted out in university theater conferences. One by one they reveal the few objects Stella left behind, a small plastic tiger and a bird cage wherein sits a gun, suggesting to the actors that everything they do is a matter of life or death.

 

   At the core of these various activities is the almost empty play they are rehearsing—the characters consisting of Pablo, the Paper Boy, a Tamale Vendor, a Colored Woman, a Mexican Woman, a Negro Woman, Steve, Stella's friend Eunice, the Nurse, and the Doctor—a truly lunatic production, which, nonetheless, is quite revelatory of the play itself.

     Every now and then the actors step out of character, speaking directly to the audience about events or, at one point, asking audience members to take out small pieces of paper and write down the teacher or other person who most influenced them. The action also includes—in contrapuntal reaction to the absurdly strict methods of "The Approach" (hinting at the equally absurd restrictions of Adler's and Lee Strasberg's "The Method")—a ridiculously witty tiger, who from time to time appears ready to dine on the actors, and in the end, goes off with their most contentious member, Elizabeth Johns. The play also presents a truly gratuitous sex scene, wherein the women begin kissing and the men run in from the wings, stark-naked, except for balloon's tied to their penises, thus keeping them seemingly erect.

     If this all sounds strangely experimental, it is not. For the Rude Mechs have balanced their play between satire and a sense of modest reverence. They are, after all, actors themselves, and as loony as Burden's techniques may appear, the actor-characters keep a respectful distance from all-out camp.
     Of course, the play is a satire at heart, and as much as the audience may wish to believe in such a strict theatrical authoritarian or that good theater results from such stunted techniques, the play itself pushes against this. Yet the actors (Thomas Graves, Hannah Kenah, Lana Lesley, E. Jason Liebrecht, and Shawn Sides, who also served as director) have not only a respect for the fiction they have created but have expanded the myth of Stella Burden far beyond the theater stage. In response to their various web calls for information about this obscure teacher, the group or others noted her interest in the Los Angeles artist Chris Burden, who not only shared her last name but was himself injured by a gun during an art performance. The artist claims no knowledge of her.

 

    In some reports, Stella is said to have been killed by a gun similar to one left behind. In still another commentary, a writer notes that when Stella Adler performed in film she added an "r" to her name (Ardler), while Stella Burden dropped the "r" when she performed in that medium (Buden). When asked by a student whether this had any relationship between the two, Stella wittily and vaguely punned: "Some are and others aren't."

     The strangest suggestion is that Burden's close relationship with Marilyn Monroe may have been behind the actresses' breakup with Joe DiMaggio!

     All of this lovely nonsense reminds me, in part, of Eleanor Antin's establishment of her performative dancer, Eleanora Antinova, for whom Antin created photos of works she had choreographed, a series of performed plays, drawings, autobiographical writings, etc., going so far as to lecture on her life with Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where several people approached her in awe, one even offering to support her balletic school. It also reminds me a little of my own self-created author Claude Richochet, whose various works have appeared in books and journals over the years.

     In short, The Method Gun is not simply a work of the stage but is a grander creation of theatrical history and fiction.

     On stage, the actors finally reach what appears to be an impasse, Elizabeth Johns suggesting they sell everything and go away to another country. The others, however, are adamant in their devotion to the single performance of their play-without-a-play the next day. The tension becomes so palpable that one member grabs the gun, shooting it at each of them. It is, after all and fortunately, only a stage gun that shoots blanks.

     Yet when they actually do perform Williams' "shell," the actors (both Burden's supposed company and the Rude Mechs) do endanger their lives. Swinging several lamps in opposing directions, company members silently enact their roles within range of the missiles with a balletic intensity, balancing the real possibility of being killed or at least knocked out with the concentration on their miniscule roles put into motion. The effect is absolutely stunning, and the audience was truly awed. The company responded to the audience with a projected listing upon the walls of the those figures who had been so important in their lives. Among them was the playwright Mac Wellman. I had written the name of my mentor Marjorie Perloff, which somehow was misread as Penloff—the "r" disappearing just as it had for Stella Burden, she too becoming one of the ones who "aren't."

Los Angeles, June 17, 2011

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 2011)