- OTHER MEDIA
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- Something absurd you may have heard
Cutting Ball's Bald Soprano and Spare Stage's A Body of Water
- SF Bay Guardian November 18, 2009 (Robert Avila)
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- The Bald Soprano and A Body of Water, two very different
plays, share a strange symmetry. Both feature a married couple with no
recollection whatsoever of their longstanding daily relationship who gingerly
grope toward mutual recognition.
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- Cutting Ball Theater's slick production of Eugene Ionesco's The
Bald Soprano clocks in at a breezy and laugh-filled 70 minutes. Artistic
director Rob Melrose's staging is exactingly precise yet nimble enough
to seem almost carefree. That dovetails nicely with Ionesco's text —
offered here in Melrose's own fresh and astute translation — whose
surreal linguistic contortions famously grew from the playwright's attempt
to learn English from the usual textbooks and their usual absurdities:
"You are my husband, Mr. Smith. I am your wife, Mrs. Smith. We live
in London. We had braised beef shanks for dinner. I wear my hat outside
but not inside"
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- Things like that. I don't know about you, but people who talk this
tediously are something of a perverse turn on. And so it was for Ionesco,
onetime ESL hopeful, whom it's all too easy to imagine gleefully holed
up in language lab, under a sweaty pair of bulky headphones, tittering
shamelessly to himself and getting a big idea.
- The idea starts with a Mr. and Mrs. Smith of London (David Sinaiko
and Paige Rogers). They get a visit from the Martins (Caitlyn Louchard
and Donell Hill), who upon being left alone together become blank slates
to one another and must painstakingly reacquaint themselves. An upstart
maid (Anjali Vashi) and a boyishly enthusiastic fire captain (Derek Fischer)
also make memorable contribution to the mix. The plot is about as complex
and meaningful as one you might find on Sesame Street, but it's just this
lack of semantic sense that makes the play enduringly provoking and anxiously
funny.
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- Cast and director ground the play's giddy, unhinged quality in bright,
highly articulate, physically taut comedic performances, set on designer
Michael Locher's swank orange-toned living room as if collapsed onto the
glossy page of a magazine. Culminating in deftly choreographed mayhem,
as all spout non sequiturs and literally bounce off the walls, Cutting
Ball's smart showmanship finds just the right visual and gestural corollaries
to Ionesco's wonderful linguistic somersaults.
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- A Body of Water is a 2005 work by American playwright Lee Blessing,
presented by Spare Stage. A man named Moss (James Allen Brewer) and a woman
named Avis (Holly Silk) confront each other cordially in bathrobes one
morning in a remote lakeside house, and proceed to puzzle out who each
one is and the exact nature of their relationship. Before long, a young
woman named Wren (Halsey Varady) arrives. They suspect she may be their
daughter, but who knows? Moss and Avis are wary of appearing completely
clueless, and thus resist asking obvious questions. Soon, though, Wren
takes dramatic charge of the situation, leveling a series of competing
"back stories" at the couple with something between sorrowful
exasperation and sadistic delight.
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- Funny at moments but generally darker and more sinister in tone, A
Bodyof Water — decently but somewhat haltingly acted under direction
of Stephen Drewes — starts out a little like Ionesco and quickly veers
toward Harold Pinter. Indeed, Blessing's fraught exploration of memory,
of our discrete and linked identities, and of attendant power plays in
close quarters are probably too reminiscent of Pinter, since they never
really do him justice. Midway through, the play's drama strains under its
own premise and an increasingly tedious set of reversals, and begins to
founder.
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- But Spare Stage's venturing into Blessing's Body of Water reveals starkly
what makes the humor in Soprano so unnerving and successful: language is
the ground beneath our sense of identity. Ionesco's big idea was to make
everyday language nonsensical enough to become transparent in both its
function and its inadequacy. In both plays, with differing degrees of success,
a crisis in the ability to name, and therefore recognize ourselves, points
to a miraculous and precarious fact: as persons we may talk the talk, but
we walk on water
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