undergroundzero festival in review

nytheatre.com is asking three of its contributors to spend an evening at the undergroundzero festival. Their impressions of these evenings are being posted here.

Evening 3: July 24, 2008 - Ivanna Cullinan

Thank the gods of theatre for Collective: Unconscious and the sensibilities it nurtures. These plays, part of the undergroundzero festival, may not have ultimately succeeded but were alive and where they failed it was with a vigor, talent, and commitment that is lacking elsewhere.

Riffing lightly on Chekhov's play but rapidly going past that, Seth Powers's adaptation of The Proposal has Chekhov as a surgeon literally dissecting theatre after the actor playing Lómo comes out of the piece to challenge Chekhov as to how to play this material. That is the underlying thread; there is also sudden dancing to modern Russian dance interludes, speeches about how badly the US has treated Puerto Rico, a woman wielding like a ninja her lactating breast, some crotch-grabbing worthy of any bad Shakespearean clown, and a host of other rapidly executed moments. While some were a bit irritating (who needs to hear an actor bemoaning "this isn't working" as if an audience can't tell), there were also extraordinary moments—a random musical interlude with perhaps the world's most beautiful baby being carried about after a young woman singing, or when a marvelous older woman simply walked on stage from the audience to set a prop and stole the scene. The strength of this group, under the direction of Daniel Irizarry, is their physicality and presence. While their energy sometimes overwhelms the text, it did keep me engaged.

Praying Mantid by Steven Gaultney is a much simpler piece, purporting to be an emotional collision. A couple, seemingly very new to each other, starts drinking red wine and breaking bread. When it becomes time to do the deed, negotiating begins. As both characters begin to want and to not want, an inner battle begins for each that provides the majority of tension here. So, while I never believed them as a couple, both actors had a sufficiently interesting connection to their own text and needs to sustain much of the piece. Where it began to go awry was the physicalization of their emotional actions. Rather than a feeble staging of sex, director Onur Karaoglu chose a very smart grappling choreography to convey their sexual struggle to connect. It worked, but once established did not need to be repeated to the same length every time. More problematic was the "ripping" out of each other's heart, which appeared to be pulling bread dough out of torso bandages— the "ick" factor far outweighing the metaphor. But this is a very ambitious piece, attempting to cover minimally in a short span the arc of something much larger.

And the glory of that kind of effort is what makes the true theatre of off-off vital.

Evening 2: July 18, 2008 - MAGGIE CINO

Esteemed downtown company Collective: Unconscious just lost its theatre space, but that didn't keep it from mounting the second annual undergroundzero Festival. These producers have as much creative pluck as the artists they host, and the three replacement venues work so well the unsuspecting audience member will never know the festival was supposed to be all in one place. Not only is it easy to get from one to another, but some of these alternative spaces seem meant for the pieces they host.

This is certainly true of The Terrible Temptation to Do Good, presented in the back of Grace's bar on Franklin Street. An impressionistic musical take on a Weimar-style coffee shop, this eccentric little offering seems particularly intended for a noisy, casual atmosphere. An eclectically dressed band comprising a trombone player, guitarist, and keyboardist sits in the corner. A tiny, energetic MC in a webbed black hat leads an evening which includes poetry from a strange, shocked woman in red and ranting from a nicotine-addicted Erica Jong fan just in from the West Coast. All are constantly interrupted by an earnest young man shouting about unrequited love and Berlin. Atmosphere has the starring role in this brief piece.

Around the corner in the more traditional Flea space, spectacle takes top billing with political analysis and comedy as co-stars. Pinchbottom Declares War is burlesque in both the naked-dancers way as well as the first dictionary definition, "an artistic composition, esp. literary or dramatic, that, for the sake of laughter, vulgarizes lofty material." Their sendup of the current political situation doesn't cover new ground, but familiar complaints explode until they're fresh again. Pinchbottom begins with the president and his advisors finding out that "weapons of ass-destruction" are being stockpiled in the Flea Theater in SoHo by the dreaded Pinchbottom terrorist organization. Using a trial version of Google Earth, the US government plans to invades Manhattan and antics ensue. Jonny Porkpie plays the president with passion, Anita Cookie is terrific as the dimwitted drunken socialite soldier modeled on Jenna Bush, and Tigger! shows amazing range playing characters of both genders. The show's best moments go way, way beyond what's appropriate (like what that Dirty Martini can do with good clean American money—go see it if you want to know what I mean) and at the end the company inverts the striptease genre until it hits home that no matter how comfortable it is to ridicule the war from the safety of our apartments, today's political situation has unavoidable consequences.

By selecting artists and letting the artists select their material, undergroundzero creates a festival that showcases pieces at all levels of development, and from producers to artists this festival demonstrates how integral energy and ingenuity are to the creative process.

Evening 1: July 12, 2008 - Heather Lee Rogers

For Collective: Unconscious's unique undergroundzero festival Paul Bargetto curated theater artists and offered them an opportunity to workshop material of their choosing. I saw two performances in the festival. The first was Nigromantia: A Slight Return presented by Clancy Productions which featured two monologues by Don Nigro: Genesis and Golgotha. Genesis was performed by Nancy Walsh and Golgotha was performed by John Clancy. The second show was a monologue called Infanta: User's Guide written by Saviana Stanescu, performed by Erika Blaxland-de Lange. So my undergroundzero menu consisted of three solo performance pieces.

For the Genesis part of Nigromantia, Walsh plays Eve. Eve tells us about her history in the Garden of Eden—how she met Adam, what it felt like there, what happened and (most importantly) what she learned. Walsh gives a lovely performance of an Eve who is like your Mom, or your favorite Aunt—any kind, fun, woman you adored as a kid and one day realized was the smartest person that you knew.

The Golgotha piece is about a Jesus who exists in a trippy Bible world and simultaneously in modern Pittsburgh. Here the Son of God could also be a shady street character. Clancy spits out Nigro's poetic lines in a glib, rapid prattle with understated attitude. While Eve could have been baking cookies while she makes you believe God is threatened by her, Jesus is a hoodlum who may be trusted or may be hustling you. Or he may just be crazy.

The pieces strike similar ideas and themes. Both work with the concept that God is like the director of a play and that He may not be very good at his job. In fact He may be a complete failure for not being able to control actors that He mistakenly created in His own free-thinking image. In Nigromantia, Pilate crucified Jesus and God expelled the first couple from the garden for the same reason: both acts were reactions to the human propensity to create and discover.

After some audience interaction, Infanta begins with a woman waiting at a train station. She's there because she loves the fragments of people she sees in the train windows and because she loves the music in the train sounds, which tells her sad stories. Throughout the play this character (who probably has a mental disorder) flips from persona to persona and story to story about tragic women. She passes through a multitude of different names and costumes while she does this and interacts with the audience a lot. Maybe these are meant to be her stories of the people—fragments she can see in the train windows. Maybe these are the sad stories the train tells her with its sound. Or maybe she is just a crazy lady who hangs out in the train depot telling these stories to sort out her own identity. As she says at one point, "this play doesn't have a conflict, any narrativity or plot evolution." This is true. But the gleeful, beguiling, unhinged character Blaxland-de Lange portrays beneath the stories is so irresistible it is impossible not to be transfixed by her performance. I also found myself jaw-dangling-hooked because, due to the absurdist nature of the piece, absolutely anything could happen next.

The beauty of watching these performances was that it reminded me of just how simple good theater can be. One person telling a good story from a bare stage can be all you need for entertaining and compelling theater. Just that simple dynamic between the character and the audience is where the magic's at.