From the Ledge

On the plane ride home from a business trip to Boston last week, I was reading director John Waters’ Top Ten Films list in the fabulously artsy art magazine, Art Forum, and had to gag myself with a paper napkin in order to stop my belly-aching guffaws at his descriptions, including this one for Lucretia Martel’s The Headless Woman:  “Bleached hair, hit-and-run accidents, in-laws with hepatitis?  Huh? I didn’t get it, but I sure did love it!”  I’m sure Mr. Waters would be collapsing in ecstasy if he saw a performance of British playwright Howard Barker’s Minna, now having its American premiere at Trap Door Theatre, since The Headless Woman had nothing on the sheer wackiness, absurdity, and incomprehensibility of this play, which was way off even the usual Trapdoor loony scale.  I would normally be infuriated at plays like Minna, with its deliberate intent to distance itself from the audience, to create a minefield of inaccessibility for people who paid good money to see it, but I was surprisingly riveted by the unabashed dramaturgical mayhem, director Nicole Wiesner’s no-holds-barred approach, and the committed cast’s embrace of the crazy-ass material.  The evening is the equivalent of theatrical rubbernecking – you’re horrified and embarrassed at the wreckage onstage but you’re just too fascinated to look away (or call for help).  I gotta say, I quite enjoyed myself at Minna (and enjoyment is normally not a state of being I associated with my previous Trapdoor experiences, but we will let bygones be bygones).

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