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).