|
review NOTE:The following notice reviews the initial run of "MedeaText" at City Garage last July. Some cast changes may have occurred since this earlier staging. Depending upon whom you talk to, the East German dramatist Heiner Müller (1929-1995) was either:
This difference of opinion is largely split on European/American lines. In Germany, his plays and performance texts are revered; here, they’re ignored. One thing’s for certain: they are seriously avant-garde. Müller is an easy playwright to admire, but a hard playwright to love -– unless you subscribe to his worldview, which runs roughly as follows:
Not everybody wants to embrace this kind of work. It takes a company like Santa Monica’s fearless City Garage to bring us some Müller and let us decide for ourselves. Actually, City Garage is presenting a Californized adaptation of Müller’s mid-1980s "Medea texts" -– "Despoiled Shore", "Medeamaterial", and "Landscape with Argonauts". Like Artaud’s "Jet of Blood", the three Medea texts are brief -– a few simple pages, ingredients for impressive theater. And City Garage has managed an impressive production of this difficult material, collectively titled "MedeaText: Los Angeles/Despoiled Shore". This is NC-17 theater -– and also brave, high-intellect theater. Müller takes the Medea myth and fractures it, and the company follows suit, offering a deconstuctionist production with three Medeas and three Jasons to go along with the chorus of the Women of Colchis. The story is taken to (where else?) Hollywood, where Jason is a 29-year-old entertainment executive, and Medea less his wife than dismissed flesh, her humanity imperiled by a violent culture of corporeal beauty, sex and waste, money and plastic surgery. Sure, she shouldn’t have killed the kids. But her motivations are made real by this energetic production. The three Medeas are quite effective, all guided differently under Frederique Michel’s direction. Most impressive is Ilana Gustafson as a feral, raging and brazenly sexual Medea, in what looks like an exhausting performance. Andrea Isco, who spends the entire play naked and mostly in sand, counters her by presenting an austere majesty. Longtime CG member Liz Hight plays the logical side of the murderess. (All the female cast members are nude at some point in the show, and they're often 5' away from the front row; if you don’t like theatrical nudity, do not venture into City Garage.) The three Jasons (Jeff Boyer, Christian Young Miller, and Steven Pocock) aren’t as compelling, and they keep their clothes on. (Doesn't seem fair). As a unit, one might describe them as strong and supercharged. Longhaired David Frank plays a variety of roles well, including that of Phallus (ever see a man with a dildo for a nose?) and a transvestite interviewee with great legs in a single-camera video segment. The show can seem overwhelming, but it’s never boring. It’s not very subtle, but then Müller didn’t go for subtlety. In fact, in getting back to the genius-or-hype question -– was he a great playwright or just a vulgar rewrite man for myth -– a third possibility emerges. Maybe Müller wasn’t a playwright at all. Maybe he was a revolutionary kind of theater critic, interested in a literal form of publication: he put his "reviews" of great narratives on the stage. Müller wrote from a standpoint of critical theory, deconstructing classic myths and rejecting conventional narrative for a series of associative and hallucinatory scenes that satisfied him while commenting harshly or ironically on the story at hand. Brecht? He was still a storyteller. Müller? He didn't believe in stories. If that all sounds like bullshit, it might make more sense in the context of Müller’s life in 20th-Century Germany -– most of it spent in the GDR. Time after time, he saw his generation succumb to evil and bring destruction upon itself. Hope was absent, or became a mask to hide hopelessness. Müller’s life experiences certainly contributed to his atheistic resignation, which is ironically the departure point from which his art (a gesture of hope) springs. Prick, or master playwright? Or both? You’ll have to see for yourself. "MedeaText: Los Angeles/Despoiled Shore" does a worthy job taking off from Müller’s blueprint, adding what the program calls "the shouts, murmurs and babble of our own contemporary cultural voice." Were he alive, Heiner would no doubt cackle with pride at this production. "MedeaText:
Los Angeles/Despoiled Shore", Copyright © 2000 The Write Word, Inc. All rights reserved. |