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From the moment the house lights go down and the filaments flare in giant electric bulbs, the audience is electrically present. The terrified breathing of a creature that is trapped alerts us to the fact that something has already happened, and we are there! -- here! This is the Wooster Group's production of House/Lights, in which the ensemble takes on Gertrude Stein's daunting wordplay, Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights. In Stein's "light" opera (1938), Dr. Faustus sells his soul to the devil to learn the secret of electric light. But the deal is corrupt. Dr. Faustus realizes he could have invented light anyway if he had just kept at it. He didn't have to sell his soul. In House/Lights, however, Stein's play is crossed with the story of Olga's House of Shame, a soft-core bondage and domination movie by Joseph Mawra (1964), in which the leaders of a jewel-smuggling gang of criminals find that one of their own (Elaine) has betrayed them and enlist her to torture other misbehaving or uncooperative gang members. In House/Lights, actors play double characters, one foot in Stein's creation and one in Mawra's. Thanks to Faustus's electric light, transmogrified now into the light of TV transmissions, Stein's characters enter Olga's House. Via closed-circuit video cameras, images of the Wooster actors' real-time flesh and presence are superimposed into the black-and-white movie, blending them with action that seems very far away. Faustus in real-time becomes none other than Elaine in B-movie-time, the doublecrossing courier now working at the behest of Olga/Mephistopheles. It is the riveting presence of Kate Valk as Faustus that holds down the center in this whirling ballet of characters, Olga's gang as well as Stein's: the dog (who says "thank you"), the boy and girl (and their doubles), the man from across the seas, and of course Mephistopheles. Suzzy Roche's jaded devil takes the wheel and drives Valk's Faust/Elaine on a harrowing taxi ride through hell. Between Valk's exquisite precision and Roche's louche appetites, driver and passenger cross the borders of the boundaries of identity, rolling along past fields of melodrama on the highway cadences of Stein's incisive poetry/prose. Incandescence -- the true light of personality -- is illuminated here, trapped in two or more time frames and cultural references and considered through the fractured prism of the Wooster Group's trademark mises en scene. The stage itself is miked so that the stomping of the high-heeled denizens of Olga's and the crashing of two movable catwalks figure in the operatic score. Even the lights are given their role, as Stein intended. Mounted on a moving fretwork, the oversized electric bulbs join in the ballet. The set is a strictly functional catwalk with microphone stations allowing the actors to address the audience directly, their voices distorted by an unseen technician who manifests himself as the voice of Mr. Viper. One character from the Shame oeuvre sits at a Macintalk/Powerbook station, inserting audio punctuation (phones ringing, glass breaking) until she too is swept into the action. The program offers this quote from Stein: "The scene as depicted on the stage ... is almost always in syncopated time in relation to the emotion of anybody in the audience." The Wooster Group lives up to its high standards -- lighting the lights dispassionately -- that is to say, with an intelligent passion, that is to say, with a passion for intelligence. "House/Lights" Copyright © 2005 by theater2k.com. All rights reserved. |
