From the Ledge

Nov 04

European Dis-Union

Whew! The past couple of weeks have been a whirlwind blur of commuting every week to the city of the gateway arch, and pulling in long hours on an intense strategy project. That’s the reason for the MIA, people. This grueling schedule will continue till mid January 2012 so if I’m popping in and out of this blog just keep mind I’m stuck in the middle of Missouri. As I read through the scant arts and culture listings in St. Louis’ equivalent of the Chicago Reader, the Riverfront Times, I’m struck by how culturally emaciated the denizens of this fair-sized Midwestern city seem to be. During the past several weeks, the only things playing in the city has been God of Carnage, the touring production of The Addams Family, Blood Wedding, The Who’s Tommy, and Nuts (which was turned into a movie in the late 1980s and starred Barbra Streisand as a high-class callgirl on trial for murdering one of her clients. Babs as a ‘ho? Seriously, it sounds like a sci-fi film to me). It’s a meager plate that makes me so thankful for our gloriously diverse and vibrant theater scene: on one weekend two weeks ago, I managed to catch two Chicago premieres of the works of contemporary European playwrights – Trapdoor Theatre‘ s expectedly whacked-out production of Werner Schwab’s OVERWEIGHT, unimportant: MISSHAPE – A European Supper, and Sideshow Theater Company’s more restrained staging of a similarly unconventional play, Marius von Mayenburg’s The Ugly One. Although I’m not a big fan of both, I’m still grateful Chicago affords me a look into such idiosyncratic material. I wonder how both will play in St. Louis.

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Feb 14

Inscrutable

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There’s an urban legend among film geeks everywhere about the late, great Ann Miller’s response to an interviewer’s question as to what she thought about her last film, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive – she supposedly said she didn’t know what the hell it was about, but she thought it was a hoot she was in it! Well, I felt like an Ann Miller-type audience member last week at the performance of Trap Door Theatre’s inscrutable, quite over-the-top production of Heiner Muller’s famously confounding Hamletmachine: I didn’t know what was going on for seventy minutes of my life, but I was sure having a hoot and a half of a good time! And before anyone stones me and calls me a cultural ignoramus, I meant that as a compliment.

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Jan 12

Rubbernecking

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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).