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2007-01-15T19:28:00.000-08:00

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NEW SCIENCE reviews

2006-11-22T15:15:00.000-08:00

Mega-Gotham on the Brink: New Science at Theater for the New City
A Review by Jim Feast

Foto: John Ranard

Romantic theater from its infancy with Hugo, Lord Byron and Buchner has had as one aim to make each individual audience member experience something new or, put more mundanely, thrill to a new frisson. However, there is one branch of this tradition, that of Artaud (to which the current production at the Theater for New City, New Science, belongs), which has made a radical modification of this goal. This modification can most easily be explained via an example. Imagine you are sitting in a theater, but, for the moment, you are not absorbed in the staging or even in savoring your own emotions, but suddenly shocked, even spooked, by a dawning awareness of what others in the audience are feeling.
Think how unusual this is. Knowledge of a collective mood is not what is looked for in your average theater experience, but it is an intrinsic part of a certain way of doing drama. Before giving an example of how this sensation emerges in New Science, let me describe the type of play that can produce it.
Artaud's plans for a staging of The Conquest of Mexico envisioned a theatrical experience centered on the activities of populations, not singular people. something like what was accomplished in film by Eisenstein's Potemkin or Jansco's The Red and The White. In such works, the company provides a picture of a whole people, which may make the audience come to feel its own sensation of being a group.
In this line, New Science sets out to recount the overall apocalypse/apotheosis of Any Metropolis, U.S.A., using a flood of visual, sonic and tactile aids to depict this rise and fall.
Four actors (Sheila Dabney, Claire Lebowitz, Pamela Mayo and Thomas S. Walker) tell the tale in part as chorus, in part solo, backed up by the amazing bass playing of Naisha Walton, the incantatory singing of Adela Bolet and a set cleared of the usual theater seating -- the audience sits in clumps throughout the multi-leveled space -- and partially reconstructed during the performance, dominated by a large screen on one wall that mixes silent film-like titles with simultaneous videoing of the actors in motion. In other words, the play is a multimedia bath that deliciously swamps, at times almost drowns, the viewers in sensory overload.
The characters describe the anxiety of living within a Mega-Gotham City, teetering on the brink of disaster and chaos, and how their fears are only allayed by the worship of god. This deity is (figuratively) carried on with much pomp, elevated to a pedestal, and then completely ignored. presumably because his (Johnson Anthony's) finely rendered, half-ranted, half-whispered monologue takes the citizens to task for their lack of spirituality.
The resolute choral/individual declamations about the city are not simple recitations but given great tone and verve by taking place within director Martin Reckhaus's interlocking choreography, which has the four huddling, leapfrogging, spiraling, and tiptoeing around the space as the subject dictates.
By this point, it may seem I am describing an exciting and stimulating jumble, given that the themes of the work seem so broad and vague, but the author, Jessica Slote, has beveled the drama around a number of key contradictions, such as us/them and us/nature, and used these to give body to the presentation.
For instance, taking up the second motif, in one scene, two of the actors use animal masks to half-cover -- leaving their snarling human teeth visible -- their faces, and prowl menacingly around the two hapless humans. Suddenly, a flash of light and roles reverse. Humans are chowing down on the slaughtered beasts. (Or are the dead simply humans who had donned animal faces?)
Almost the whole work gives a collective portrait of the city, except for the end where, in a startling coup de theater, the universal exposition is dropped and the last moments unfold in the bosom of a nuclear family. Yet, given the previous, it is obvious that this family holds inside it and can only be understood from the perspective of the totality. Knowledge of the cog is dependent on seeing the vast machinery of the state, which this play triumphantly explores.
To return to my starting point, only such a monumental, choral, super-sensory approach can render a new way of looking at ... the audience of which you are a member. This is a tradition that in America has fallen on the wayside since the 1960s, so if you want to see a work that magnificently and robustly upholds this tradition, go to New Science, where you will find yourself thrust at points into an appreciation of the collective in, for example, the following moment in the play.
The four actors, supplemented by the singer, bass, and light effects, began to be frightened. They feel the presence of mysterious and potently evil "creatures," stirring in the surrounding woods. Halfway through this evocative and impassioned passage, we, the audience as a whole, realize we are the terrifying animals that ring and endanger the troupe, just as in "real life," we, every group, pose a collective threat to punish our world by destroying it.

Foto: John Ranard

Civilization and Its (Dis)Content: NEW SCIENCE, a new play at Theater for the New City
a review by Anitta Santiago

The commercials are already airing for the Christmas movies and while we will all debate over whether it is too early, too commercializing, we must all agree that these kinds of things, the release of Christmas movies and books, help us celebrate the holiday. But now the question of its prematurity comes into play, as I realize that Thanksgiving does not get this same kind of attention and so we have very little in terms of cinematic, dramatic, or literary production to help us celebrate the holiday. But this year we have New Science, based on Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico's Nuova Scienza. This, of course, is not properly a Thanksgiving play, but it is timely for this week. As we celebrate what is essentially a holiday that marks our civilization, that is itself a human construct (the holiday comes literally from a human production, from William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation), it is an appropriate time to consider civilizations, particularly our civilization, and in light of past November elections, to consider what it means to shape a new vision.

The play, set against realism, in the tradition of The Living Theater, immediately destroys the fourth wall, as four actors take four positions all around the room, and a screen at the head of the room displays various images projected from below by the man behind the computer. One struggles to figure out what it is you are supposed to look at. What seems at first to be an onslaught of information challenges the viewer to select what he or she will look at. I noticed that the play itself provided very little cues on whatever you would choose to see. As you watch, you begin to build your autonomy and watching is no longer passive, but truly active. At the play’s opening, actors Sheila Dabney, Claire Lebowitz, Pamela Mayo, and Thomas Walker, playing the Scientists in the mode of the Greek chorus, from their respective corners give a litany of cities while Naisha Walton on upright bass and singer Adela Maria Bolet provide the music that is the backbone of the play. But more on the music later. The litany is at the same time disorienting and captivating. At the performance this past Saturday, it became participatory as one of the audience members supplied cities to the litany herself. This I read as the power of the fourth wall breakdown, the development of audience autonomy and activity already in effect.

The play seems to follow Vico's outline of the three stages of civilization. The first segment is the divinity stage. Johnson Anthony as the Divinity wails and rails watching the humans in their displays of emotions, vanities, anguish, misunderstanding, etc., and their tales of civilization. The charging of the ramp to the city and the battle of civilizations closes out the divinity stage and opens to the heroic, laid bare and grotesque by the image of humans munching on the bones of the other. Amidst displays of what seems to be the history of science and human development (or lack thereof), Sheila Dabney delivers a captivating performance of the rationales that justify human behavior in the context of civilization, and exposes what really lies behind the so-called "heroic." The final stage, the human, brings us to the family. Pamela Mayo takes on the image of the phallus while Thomas Walker dons breasts to portray Manwoman and Womanwo, while Claire Lebowitz powerfully evokes the frustration of innocence in jaded world.

This is an at best, crude organization of what perhaps should not be organized. One of the central themes at work in the play is the chaos of information and the hunger for meaning, a meaning that is provided only by stories. As your eyes dart from corner to corner to screen and you try to figure out the relationship, if there be any, between all the visual materials, one comes to see the fundamental cooperation between science and art that is seldom acknowledged anymore, probably since late Romanticism. Science, as an attempt to create new things and organize the world, mirrors the arts, the literary and creative imagination. The play, though, testifies that the current vision, one predominantly of science and technology, that has been organizing and creating our world is flawed, that we need a new vision. In the final scene, the stage of the human, Womanwo and Manwoman sing the cultural attitudes of the time, in all the tones of all the isms. From their interchange breaks the shrieking of the Baby, "wanna know, wanna know, wanna know." As the parents sing their song, the Baby delivers a powerful soliloquy of existential despair, and breaking from the parents, alone on the Ramp, the Baby cries. While this is the one scene that concentrates the action in a single place, it still fights against the fourth wall as you notice the screen continues. And on the screen is the face of the Baby crying, and the screen becomes a canvas for a powerful portrait. The collapse of science and art, it would seem. The Baby alone on the ramp is in the middle of this Kierkegaardian moment, overwhelmed with fear and trembling by her complete moral freedom, broken off from the codes and concepts of her parents' generation, as she realizes her existential aloneness in the world. The Divinity meets her and takes her hand, and they walk off the ramp of civilization, towards, perhaps, the dawning of a new vision.

For those like myself with a limited understanding of Vico, the play might be a harder, though still worthwhile, exercise in mental concepts and philosophies. Where, I would argue, the play reaches its greatest power is in its emotional appeal. The onslaught of information disarms your mind from trying to figure it all out and you have to submit to the sensitivity of the emotions. This is where the music must be discussed. Music seems to be the one true organizing principle of the play, and it is an emotional instrument. The litany of saints, the blowing wind, and the vision of the "vast distant city" serve as the chorus of civilizations; chorus in many respects, as in the Greek chorus of drama but also as a musical chorus, the repeated lines of a song. Amidst all the chaos of the human speech and
activity, Bolet's singing provides harmony in counterpoint. At the end, the characters recede out of sight, and all we are left with is music. Music qualifies as an organizing principle for this play because it is a collapse of science and art, mathematical and emotional, imaginative. The play itself becomes a song, that age-old bearer of history, or vision and poetry, and of freedom.

This is the month of our civilization, and New Science may be precisely what will bring this season into focus. After the turkey has been eaten and you're stuffed with stuffing, it may be a good time to reflect and to feel, what does it all mean? Where do we go from here?

NEW SCIENCE Reinvents Reality
a review by Maria Micheles

A most interesting feeling is having a ticket in your hand and not being sure you’ll be let into the play--you want to see the play a helluvalot more. Only someone from the play has to come out and bring you into the play, but he may choose his friends or those who seem to be—forget about the queue for this one—just try to seem like you’re a good person.

The lines on the screen as you enter say, “exploration of dangerous material.” And you hear, “Mortals are rushing to the future in a mad pace and at every corner are making decisions.”

This is Artaudian stuff, new, different, disturbing, real, and not to be confused with realism. NEW SCIENCE declares today’s ideology of realism to be passé. What’s the problem with realism? It’s uninteresting.

The creative team and ensemble that conceived New Science, has worked together in many configurations since the early 1980’s. This company’s work comes out of The Living Theater and is grounded in the ideas of Antonin Artaud. Jessica Slote (Author) says, “creating a “great realistic play” in the mold of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams fails today, because realism doesn’t render reality in a way that is useful to us now, that even captures our attention, because it doesn’t lead us to question our assumptions about reality, and that the tenets that we accept as reality are only old conventions of reality, not reality itself.”

Artaud said, “the masterpieces of the past belong in the past,” and to quote him even further, he says, “Stories about money, worry over money, social careerism, the pangs of love unspoiled by altruism, sexuality sugarcoated with an eroticism that has lost its mystery have nothing to do with the theater.” Makes you laugh, because we know all-too-well that’s our theater.

The play New Science is inspired by Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico’s (1668-1744) Nuova Scienza, which proposes a poetic wisdom, that to discover the origin one need only remember the “poetic” or “metaphysical truth,” which corresponds to the immediacy of one’s sense-experience, pure feeling, curiosity, wonder, fear, superstition upon one’s first encounter with that experience.

This play definitely does that. It uses the imagination, to address our hunger for meaning in the combined past/present/future of the human condition. The performance is definitely refreshing and different. I knew it would be, and I ran 20 blocks in the rain to catch it, happy for the visceral experience that included animal hisses, crawling, writing on walls, musicians playing their instruments wherever they like, actors dragging the lights that shine on them wherever they go, and when the wires got tangled in my feet, the performer gave me this look, making sure I knew it was my job to untangle them, not theirs.

Director Martin Reckhaus and artistic director Gary Brackett, do an excellent job transforming the world looking at the world. Brackett sits with a sound system and laptop on his table, visibly running the show, while being part of it. The actors transcend from mortals to spirits or other beings. The wonderful cast includes Claire Lebowitz—Scientist and Baby, Pamela Mayo—Scientist and WoManWo, Sheila Dabney—Scientist and Representative of Mortals, Tom Walker—Scientist and ManWoMan, and Johnson Anthony plays the Divinity. The new music, composed by Patrick Grant, adds to the otherworldliness.

At one point, someone asked, “What does it mean to be human?” The response was, “Walla Walla.” Go figure. Exactly.

2006-10-30T20:25:00.000-08:00

NEW SCIENCE

Rare Opportunity to Catch
Defiant Theater Group
That Eschews Prevailing Theater Ideology

“I propose . . . a theater which, abandoning psychology, recounts the extraordinary, puts on the stage natural conflicts, natural and subtle forces, and which presents itself first of all as an exceptional force of redirection.”—Antonin Artaud

New Science, inspired by the writings of 18th century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, takes on the themes of the rise and fall of civilizations, humanity’s earliest origins, and the science of the imagination. Part-comedy, part-tragedy, part-like-nothing-you-have-ever-seen-before (with live music). “The rending of word and space, the tear and grin, these are your rewards for witnessing this group of theater artists.” (Brian Boyles, New York Theater Review critic). Director Martin Reckhaus and designer Gary Brackett mastermind the mise en scène, working with an original text by Jessica Slote. The creative team also includes designer Pamela Mayo and composer Patrick Grant.

This eclectic group of theater artists has been working together in various configurations since the early 80’s. Some members of the group started out in the Alchemical Theater (from Artaud’s Theater and Its Double), founded by two Living Theater actors who left the company in the late ’70s. The Alchemical Theater took off on a direction of its own. In addition to their seminal production of Artaud’s There is No More Firmament, the group created plays based on the writing of Paul Virilio, Maurice Blanchot, and other authors whose work was being published at the time by Autonomedia.

The team of theater artists presenting New Science, a major new production, defiantly resists all the prevailing theatre ideologies of our day (Method Acting, psychological theatercraft, sitcom playwrighting). If you care to see the real thing - truly avant-garde theater - not Broadway/Hollywood/sitcom wannabes - you will not miss the opportunity to see this group which only rarely appears in New York City. (Their other regular ports-of-call are Berlin and Napoli.)

New Science
Theater for the New City
Seven Performances Only! • $10
Theater for the New City • 155 First Avenue @ 10th St.
Thurs.-Sun., Nov. 16-19 • Fri.-Sun., Nov. 24-26
Nearest subway: F train to 1st Avenue • 4,5,6 to Astor Place

For information go to
Theater for the New City
Limited Seating • For reservations call (212) 254-1109

NEW SCIENCE

Directed by Martin Reckhaus
Book by Jessica Slote
Designed by Gary Brackett and Pamela Mayo
Music by Patrick Grant

info: reck@mindspring.com

2006

"What does it mean to be human?"