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).
Howard Barker is a British playwright who came up with the phrase “Theater of Catastrophe” to describe his works which are written to intentionally come up with a unique, individualistic response from each audience member. From his Wikipedia entry: “Where other playwrights might clarify a scene, Barker seeks to render it more complex, ambiguous, and unstable.” Ok now! Taken on these terms, then, Minna, somewhat based on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s comedy of manners Minna von Barhelm, about a young lady’s romance with a bitter, penniless military officer, is quite successful as a Barker work. This is the first play I’d been to in the couple of years I’ve been writing this blog that I absolutely had no idea what was going on most of the time – discombobulation is the natural audience response between the stylized acting styles; the fast forwarding and back tracking between time periods; the disconnected conversations; and the random characters including a mute, barechested Cupid slinking along the stage in either sheets, hotpants, or hipster jeans, two hanging “live” corpses who alternately mimic and annotate the headscratching action, and a hotel owner who shares a split personality with his baby girl doll. In the second act, when the male servant Just crossdressed as a farm maid, sat on a swing, and sang a rap song with the hanging corpses dancing (or nodding) along, I thought the entire solar system exploded and I found myself in some alternative proto-universe of theatrical craziness. WTF!!!
Yeah, yeah, so Barker makes some points about the immorality, deception, and delusion of supposedly virtuous people, but really, the script is so trashed, it’s not even important to discuss it. I think the evening is ultimately memorable because Wiesner and her actors and creative team throw themselves firmly, fiercely, and committedly into the weirdness. Wiesner’s images, with great contributions from the sexy, vaguely debauched costumes designed by Beata Pilch and Nevena Todorovic and the creepy-noirish lighting of Richard Norwood, are memorable: Minna and the three actresses playing Francisca solemnly but almost menacingly parading through the theater wearing black shrouds; Minna’s lover Tellheim being buggy-whipped by the sergeant Werner in a subtly S-and-M-way; the naked Cupid on a catwalk dropping the billowing sheet he is wearing onto the actors onstage below (as is usual at Trap Door, where everyone pairs acting in the play with something else, the actor playing Cupid, Dave Holcombe, is also the box-office person. Where else in this city, other than Trap Door Theater, can you have a guy cross your name off the reservations list and hand you a program one minute, and then show you his bare ass the next?)
I also admire Wiesner’s cast since works like Minna may be as infuriating to the actors, who are attempting to find character arcs in characters that seem to be written without any, as they are to the audience members trying to understand motivations and relationships. The whole cast is commendable, with everyone throwing themselves onto the demands of text as if they’re jumping into lifeboats being launched out of the Titanic, but special props go to Geraldine Dulex who plays Minna as a cross between a young Gloria Swanson diva-in-training and a contemporary heroine; the always-riveting Kevin Cox whose Tellheim is inadvertently funny in his mix of sarcasm and cluelessness; and Carl Wisniewski whose Just is both sleazy and sympathetic in his despair at his servant class status and his fierce, almost homoerotic, protectiveness towards his master Tellheim. Minna is consistent with the type of obtuse, headache-inducing theater that Trapdoor has the dubious monopoly on in this city; it’s probably one of the first shows I’ve seen there, though, that has made me want to come back.
Tags: Trap Door Theatre
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