“Stupid Fucking Bird” at 12 Peers Theater

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12 Peers Theater

Playwright Aaron Posner gets something that few American directors and actors do: Anton Chekhov’s plays are funny.Not smiling-wryly funny, or inwardly-groaning funny, but actually-get-you-to-burst-out-laughing funny. They’re chock full of comic situations, oddball characters, and ridiculous turns of events; the problem is that most American interpretations of Chekhov, seduced by the psychological depth in his plays, treat them as melodrama rather than satire (a relatively recent exception to that tendency was PICT’s 2012 production of Three Sisters, directed by Harriet Power). But Posner isn’t fooled by all that theatrical realism, and in Stupid Fucking Bird, his “sort of” adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull,he not only translates Chekhov’s comedy into an idiom we can chuckle at, but also threads a commentary on the relationship of artists and their audience that highlights the gulf between the meaning artists seek to convey and the messages audiences receive.

Posner’s theatrical world roughly echoes Chekhov’s in terms of plot and characters (although most of the character names have been de-Russified), but onto that he has layered a metatheatrical conceit: the actor/characters regularly address the audience directly, as people who are aware that they are characters in a play. This fourth-wall breaking brings a giddy energy to the play, especially because it’s rather haphazardly deployed. At some points it seems as if we are being addressed by the characters themselves – like when the suicidal playwright Con (Chris Cattell) encourages us to imagine a new kind of theater, one completely unlike the play we are watching right now – but at other points it feels like we are being addressed by the actors – as when Matt Henderson tells Cattell that he shouldn’t expect the audience to respond to a direct request for advice, because “they know you’re fictional,” and Cattell looks at us desperately and pleads “If only I had some friend in the audience.”

Stupid Fucking Bird has a lot of complicated moving parts, sliding as it does between and among Chekhov’sThe Seagull,Posner’s adaptation of The Seagull as Stupid Fucking Bird, the play-within-the-play called Here We Are that Con presents to his mother Emma (Maura Underwood) and her lover Trigorin (Stefan Lingenfelter), and Posner’s many and varied metatheatrical asides. Director Vince Ventura has added his own layer of complexity in the form of choreographed moments of reflection and in sound and lighting cues that pull the play out of the real and into a heightened theatricality during some of its more “meta” moments and that look and feel very much like the kind of thing Con would stage as part of his own attempts to remake the art of theater (more metatheatricality!)

This is some of the strongest work I’ve seen 12 Peers Theater produce to date. Cattell grounds the production with his nuanced characterization of Con; the characters who orbit around his absurd existential despair include Sarah Chelli’s ebullient – and later bat-shit crazy – Nina, Underwood’s regally narcissistic Emma Arkadina, Henderson’s neurotic sadsack Dev, and Sara Ashley Fisher’s gothically depressed Mash. Lingenfelter is likeable (perhaps rather too much so) as the genius writer Trigorin, and David Maslow plays a baffled and existentially-challenged Dr. Sorn.

“White Rabbit, Red Rabbit” at 12 Peers Theater

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You may have already heard a little bit about Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit, Red Rabbit. But probably only just a little bit: secrecy is an essential precondition to any performance of his script. I hesitate to call White Rabbit, Red Rabbit a “play”; it’s not a drama with characters and plot, but rather a scripted piece of storytelling-cum-performance art, with a sly conceit: the actor performing Soleimanpour’s script does not know what he/she will be reading until the moment he/she has opened an envelope containing the script on stage, in front of the audience. From that moment on, the evening unfolds as a kind of meta-meditation on author-ity, coercion, and the ease with which humans can be manipulated into complicity in the oppression of others (or in our own oppression).

Performer Ingrid Sonnichsen

Soleimanpour wrote this script six years ago, at the age of 29, when he was unable to leave Iran due to his refusal to serve in the military (a precondition for obtaining a passport). The script captures, for audience members living in more openly democratic societies, the dynamic of living under conditions of oppression by capitalizing on theater’s inherent hierarchies – that is, the subservience of the actor to the script and the implied contract of “play” between actor and audience. Both actor and audience members are asked to do many things in the course of the evening, and as in any theater event that involves audience participation, the (un)lucky sap who gets tapped may find herself doing something she wouldn’t normally agree to do (or finds psychologically, ethically, or physically uncomfortable). Soleimanpour’s mischievous move is to turn our willingness to go along for the sake of the show against us, exposing both audience and actor alike in acts of coercion and betrayal.

I’ve probably said too much; the program insert admonishes “NO SPOILERS.” So I’ll turn to a safer subject: praise of the performer. No actor can perform this play twice, so when you see White Rabbit, Red Rabbit you’ll see a completely different show; but I had the very good fortune to witness the masterful Ingrid Sonnichsen, who dove in gamely, adding a wickedly sardonic sense of humor to the performance and infusing it with warmth, honesty, and presence.

“Detroit” at 12 Peers Theater

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Set not in Detroit itself, but in one of those cookie-cutter model-home communities that once housed vibrant family-friendly communities on the outskirts of cities like it, Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit opens as Mary (Alyssa Herron), a paralegal, and her husband Ben (Brett Sullivan Santry), a recently laid-off loan officer, host a barbecue dinner for their new neighbors, Sharon (Sara Fisher) and Kenny (John Feightner). Mary and Ben are solidly “normal” strivers toward the American Dream: they’ve got the recognizable accoutrements and trappings of proper consumerist life – discount patio set, aspirational taste in food, a mortgage on one of those starter homes with some deferred maintenance issues – along with all the nervous anxiety and bickering that comes with the stress of Ben’s layoff. Sharon and Kenny, on the other hand, exist on the margins of that dream. Just released from rehab for major substance abuse, they’ve moved into Kenny’s deceased aunt’s house and are trying to reboot their lives as sober citizens. Their physical, emotional, and psychological incursion into Ben and Mary’s carefully contained lives not only reveals the fissures and cracks in Ben and Mary’s relationship, but also pokes through the threadbare patches in the fabric of early twenty-first century American society.

I’m being deliberately cagey in describing what happens in the play because it has a number of plot twists it would be unfair to give away. Suffice it to say that Ben and Mary’s relatively blinkered experience of life has them at a disadvantage: they can’t even begin to compass the way Sharon and Kenny – who describe themselves as “white trash” – encounter and cope with the world. The two couples inhabit completely different universes: Ben and Mary are holding desperately onto the piece of the pie they’ve managed to slice off, whereas Sharon and Kenny have nothing at all, which means they have nothing to lose. Their abandon, their lack of heed and their impulsive hedonism are scary – but also seductive and, as it turns out, radically subversive.

The 12 Peers ensemble is good at capturing the mayhem of many of the script’s moments, showing how even small stressors can set off manic responses. But they have more difficulty capturing its dangerous edginess. Fisher and Feightner’s Sharon and Kenny seem too affable and middle class; it’s hard to see in them people who have lived most of their lives on the fringes and in a criminal and drug underworld. As Mary, Herron is suitably tightly wound, but it’s Santry who stands out in the cast as the anxious, self-defeating Ben. James Jamison’s set evocatively conjures the small backyards of the kind of starter home my own grandparents purchased in the fifties (just outside of Detroit, no less!), making the final scene a poignant one for those of us who have seen how such neighborhoods have changed over the decades. But the production design could have used better planning for its multiple scene changes, all of which involved overly lengthy blackouts to allow for a clumsy shifting of props and scenery.

“Underneath the Lintel” at 12 Peers Theater

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12 Peers Theater

A Baedeker’s Travel Guide is returned to a Dutch library 113 years overdue. The librarian who finds the volume in the returned book slot – a fussy, rule-bound man if ever there was one – is, at first, only astonished by the audacity of the person who returned it surreptitiously to the slot instead of facing the consequences at the front desk! But as he digs into the files to find out who to dun for the “fine of his life,” The Librarian (for we do not know him by any other moniker) begins to unravel a mystery about another man’s life that quickly has profound effects on his own, sending him on a journey around the world, out of his comfort zone, and into a realm of physical and existential agitation he never could have imagined experiencing.

That’s as much of a “plot summary” I would want to give about Glen Berger’s play Underneath the Lintel (12 Peers Theater, at Pittsburgh Playwrights) without spoiling its charming and thought-provoking effect, which depends to a certain extent on taking a journey into the unknown with its solitary main character. Structured as an eighty-minute lecture-presentation by the Librarian (Randy Kovitz) to an imagined audience (us) brought to the venue for “An Impressive Presentation of Lovely Evidences” (whatever that is), the play traces, in retrospect, the discoveries he makes as he follows the trail of mysterious clues left by the patron who originally checked out the Baedeker. What the “evidences” eventually point to test the limits of belief and require a leap of faith which the rational, reality-based Librarian may or may not be fully prepared to take (and he is understanding of our skepticism if we are not prepared to take that leap, either). As the Librarian gets further and further from his safe, insular existence, parallels between his own life and that of the figure he suspects to be his mystery patron start to emerge: both are risk-averse, opting for comfortable, small lives; both hesitate to make a brave and bold choice at a decisive moment; and in both cases, the cowardly choice eventually results in a lonely, anonymous, unmoored life. Searching for the borrower of the book forces the Librarian not only to confront past mistakes, but to open himself to adventure, to the hazards of chance, and to the terrifying, exhilirating scope of existence – along with the awful, inescapable fact of its finiteness.

Advertising materials for the show describe it as “an existential detective story,” and that’s an apt description, but you shouldn’t let the word “existential” scare you off.  Kovitz’s Librarian is endearing and believable as a naïve provincial propelled by curiosity into both the wider world and the deepest of inquiries, and he wrings a lot of comedy out of the character’s pedantry and fuddy-duddiness. Moreover, by infusing an almost child-like quality into the character, Kovitz keeps the discoveries fresh and avoids letting the more philosophical sections of the play get too heavy, which is certainly a risk in the material. There are a lot of “big questions” posed by the play – of the “why are we here?” variety – but Kovitz’s Everyman diffidence and innocence helps give us the courage to open ourselves to those questions, even if the answers are as elusive as the man for whom the Librarian continues to search.

 

Your Tatler has been a busy audience member and blogger this past week: four shows and posts in the space of five days! Looking ahead on the calendar, there’s the Bach Choir of Pittsburgh’s “French Kiss” concert on February 14th & 16th, which features Requiems by Fauré and Duruflé, exquisitely beautiful music: don’t miss it! And barebones is opening A Steady Rain, which I hope I’ll be able to catch early in its run (and blog about here).