There is a delightful episode in Chris Phillips’s play Elysian Fields, which was presented at the Kraine Theatre during this year’s New York Fringe Festival, when the characters Maggie (“the cat”) and Skipper, from Tennessee Williams‘s play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, are talking. Skipper is recounting to Maggie the early years of his friendship with her husband, Brick Pollitt, and making a veiled confession about the tenacity of his attachment to Brick. He describes a hot southern afternoon as he watches an old tabby cat patiently riding out the uncomfortable afternoon heat on a rooftop, awaiting a patch of shadow to alleviate its situation. He is struck by the cat’s stoic forbearance. He has it in mind to be just like that cat in life, patiently staying put, expectant that what he desires will one day fall to him. This image is more famously invoked by Maggie in Williams’s celebrated play, when following Skipper’s death, she pleads for her grieving husband’s attention and affection. It’s a clever piece of writing, respectfully returning us to the allusive power of Williams’s theatrical storytelling.

The pleasures of Phillips’s play, and they are many, are watching well known characters from the works of Williams acting in freshly contrived scenes. He releases the characters from their celebrated, somewhat tragical cages, to breathe and talk again in earlier phases of their stories. Most especially he is resurrecting the ghosts of three deceased characters, figures whose tragic demise worked as triggers for Williams’ plays, A Streetcar Named Desire, Suddenly Last Summer, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Allan, Sebastian, and Skipper never make appearances in these three plays, but their ghosts pervade the stories, propelling the action. They are all coded as homosexual and as such are emblematic of Williams’s relationship with his own sexuality and its configuration in dramatic works that  powerfully addressed the social taboos of his time. Phillips, in large part, is respectful of the mores that prevailed during the period of rapid social evolution these theatre works spanned, from WWII through the dawn of the sixties counter cultural revolution. He is sensible too of the cultural status some of the characters have attained today. So he can throw us delicious treats with scenes in which a youthful Blanche DuBois succumbs to her own carnal appetite; Sebastian rubbishes his poetry and yearns to run through his mother’s garden setting the plantings on fire; and Brick and Skipper go at it in a chair as Maggie sleeps in the room next door. Whether or not Williams might approve such liberties is not so much the point as whether they hold up in context of the original plays. In a rush of desire the young Blanche might well have lost her affected little head, but did the playwright envision the spit-lubricated attachment we are presented with here between Skipper and Brick? The times were the times, and frustrated desire is most pointedly Williams’s theme, not clandestine liaisons. His dramas are filled with allusions to castration and lobotomy. Sex, for the principal characters, is an agent of destruction and chaos, rarely ecstatic release.

But perhaps that’s a quibble. Before the shadow of tragedy overtakes each tale, there is much to enjoy. Suicide and murderous vengeance take their toll on all our resurrected phantoms. Asking why Williams insisted on these endings for these characters is a bit like asking why Iphigenia had to be sacrificed at the beginning of the Trojan War. These are the original blood sacrifices that offend justice, that precipitate the action, that sow potential ruin for all in proximity. It’s one thing to play at revisionism in works like L. Frank Baum‘s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, but something else to tangle with the complex psychological, elaborately theatricalized characters of Williams the playwright. Acts of redemption are nice, but can Phillips really have these characters ask their original author why they had to die thus? As affecting as this is, it is a contemporary sensibility addressing that of another era. If you begin that process, there is no likelihood it could ever end. And perhaps there’s something willfully anachronistic about it. Which is perhaps why in the final act we are left with a fantasy realm, with neither recourse to Williams’s world, or our own. Here at least, the three fated figures can arrange themselves into a somewhat classical tableau of heroic brotherhood, no longer alone, rinsed temporarily of the tragedy that hangs over them. Fanciful and affecting sure, but you can’t file down all of the sharp corners of life, in the real world or the fictional one; not if you want anything to be worthy of the term tragedy.

The production, by Revolve Productions, glides seamlessly from opening to end, figured with a minimum of props, some well-used lighting, and just five actors. Amanda Kruger, as the only female cast member, has the unenviable task of filling some major iconic pumps in the parts of Blanche, Catherine, and Maggie, and she does very nicely. Muscular performances are turned in by all the men, Scott Hinson (Sebastian), Aaron Hartzler (Skipper), and Daniel Marks (Brick), with the stand-out Miles Cooper (winner of a Fringe 2011 acting honor) as young Allan, disarmingly vulnerable as he approaches his shrouded desire nature. With his co-director, John Michael Beck, Phillips pulls out all of the drama written in to this accomplished new play, and New York can only hope that this production, so cruelly cut short by the onslaught of Irene, will rise again for a longer run. It should not be short of a captivated audience.

~~~

Elysian Fields ran until August 26, 2011 as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.
 

Related Posts:

• Pieces (Fringe Festival 2012)
• Pink Milk (Fringe Festival 2012)
• FringeNYC Announces 2011 Encore Series
• Smoke The New Cigarette (Fringe Festival 2011)
• The Pretty Trap – If “Glass” Had Never Broken

Didn’t get a chance to see some of the Fringe shows everyone was raving about?  Wish there was another shot at seeing some of the plays THM reviewers couldn’t get enough of?  Well now’s your chance! 18 Hit FringeNYC Shows Return in September!  Beginning September 9th, the FringeNYC Encore Series will take place at the SoHo Playhouse and The Players Theatre. All tickets are $18, available beginning August 29th.  Call 866-468-7619 or click here.

SOHO PLAYHOUSE

• After Anne Frank: Sat 9/10 @ 4:30pm, Sat 9/17 @ 4, Wed 9/21 @ 8pm, Fri 9/23 @ 9:30pm.
• facebook me: Sun 9/11 @ 2pm, Sat 9/17 @ 2pm, Sun 9/18 @ 2pm, Sat 9/24 @ 9:30pm, Sun 9/25 @ 2pm.
• The More Loving One: Sun 9/11 @ 7:30pm, Wed 9/14 @ 9pm, Tue 9/20 @ 8pm, Thu 9/22 @ 9:30pm, Mon 9/26 @ 8pm.
• Fourteen Flights: Mon 9/12 @ 8pm, Tue 9/13 @ 8pm, Thu 9/15 @ 9:30pm, Fri 9/16 @ 9pm, Sun 9/18 @ 7:30pm
• PigPen Presents The Mountain Song: Wed 9/14 @ 7pm, Sat 9/17 @ 9:30pm, Sun 9/19 @ 8pm, Sat 9/24 @ 5pm, Sun 9/25 @ 7:30pm.

HURON CLUB @ SOHO PLAYHOUSE

• Paper Cut: Fri 9/9 @ 7pm, Sat 9/10 @ 5pm, Sun 9/11 @ 7:30pm, Mon 9/12 @ 8pm, Tue 9/13 @ 8pm.
• You Only Shoot The Ones You Love:  Fri 9/9 @ 9:30pm, Wed 9/14 @ 7pm, Thu 9/15 @ , Fri 9/16 @ 10pm.
• Bongani: Sat 9/17 @ 4:30pm, Sun 9/18 @ 5pm, Mon 9/19 @ 8pm, Wed 9/21 @ 8pm.
• Who Loves You Baby?:  Sun 9/18 @ 7:30pm, Tue 9/20 @ 8pm, Thu 9/22 @ 8pm, Sun 9/25 @ 7:30pm.

PLAYERS THEATRE

• I Will Be Good: Fri 9/9 @ 7pm, Sun 9/11 @ 4pm, Sat 9/24 @ 5pm, Sun 9/25 @ 6pm.
• Araby: Sat 9/10 @ 5pm, Sun 9/11 @ 6pm, Sun 9/18 @ 7pm, Mon 9/19 @ 7pm.
• Felony Friday:  Sat 9/10 @ 7:30pm, Sun 9/11 @ 8pm, Tue 9/13 @ 7:30pm, Thu 9/15 @ 9:30pm.
• Pearl’s Gone Blue: Fri 9/9 @ 9:30pm, Fri 9/16@ 9:30pm, Mon 9/19 @ 9pm, Sun 9/25 @ 8pm.
• The Legend of Julie Taymor,or The Musical That Killed Everybody!: Wed 9/14 @ 7pm, Thu 9/15 @ 7pm, Fri 9/16 @ 7pm, Sat 9/17 @ 7pm, Sat 9/17 @ 10:30pm.
• Parker & Dizzy’s Fabulous Journey to the End of the Rainbow:  Wed 9/14 @ 9:30pm, Sun 9/18 @ 9pm, Wed 9/21 @ 9pm, Fri 9/23 @ 7pm, Sat 9/24 @ 10pm.
• COBU – Dance like Drumming, Drum like Dancing:  Sat 9/17 @ 5pm, Sat 9/24 @ 3:30pm
• Noir: Sun 9/18 @ 4pm, Tues 9/20 @ 7pm, Thu 9/22 @ 7pm.
• Jersey Shoresical: A Frickin’ Rock Opera: Wed 9/21 @ 7pm, Thu 9/22 @ 10pm, Fri 9/23 @ 10:30pm, Sat 9/24 @ 8pm, Sun 9/25 @ 4pm.

Related Posts:

• Elysian Fields (Fringe Festival 2011)
• Smoke The New Cigarette (Fringe Festival 2011)

It’s pretty clever when a theatrical production adopts the stance that what it is about to present you with is nothing more than offensive, odious rubbish. And when it does so persistently, warning you at each interval that things are only going to get worse, more unbearable, it seems cleverer, because you have no one to blame but yourself for hanging around. And when each performance or act hones so close to the edge of becoming merely cacophonous insult, while convincing you that the method in this apparent chaos is quite sound, well, that makes it even more clever. In fact, everything about Inverse Theater‘s Smoke the New Cigarette by Kirk Wood Bromley at the Bowery Poetry Club is exceptionally clever; so clever it hurts.

We are “presented” with a radio broadcast, purporting to be live, while actually played on a recording. The unseen broadcasting DJ is recounting his introduction to an acquaintance with a new-form music duo calling themselves The New Cigarette, who describe their sound, which purposely has dispensed with both tone and rhythm (!) as “chamber punk” – a punk sensibility rendered on traditional chamber orchestra instruments. What we actually see are five “recorded” performances – the only ever made during the band’s lifetime – played live by the duo, Senstarv and Egon, on cello, piano, trombone, flute and drums – as allegedly witnessed by the broadcaster. These musical performances – free-form, dissonant, with accompanying poetry recitation – are the make-up of the show. They are framed throughout in a cascading, verbose monologue by the broadcaster, who is at pains to describe how at each successive exposure, he is convinced of the group’s worthlessness, even while finding himself recalled again and again in order to confirm this appraisal. He is gripped by a repulsion/attraction dynamic and it is the show’s intention that we are captured too. Can anything that compels our attention again and again be essentially without merit? Without meaning for us? This little confection will place you on the rack of that dilemma, and stretch and stretch.

What will keep you in your seat is the writerly language deployed throughout – in lyrics and in narrative – and the exquisitely rendered noise. A sample of Bromley’s scintillating phrases run – “Please don’t outlive me if I deadbeat myself”; “Show me mine and I’ll show you yours”; “Flush the birds from your binoculars”; “harmonious punishment, you are not exempt”. But every line is some such rich gem of nonsense and you can do yourself an injury trying to unpack each fleeting allusion. It is not a simple coincidence that the narrating broadcaster seems to have sipped from the same poetic cup as the musicians. The musical performances, appropriately, can be hard to sit through, but they are played with such a concentrated attention, such lucid particularity and skill, that you can only admire, even as you are tempted to place your hands over your ears. In one piece the duo are joined by guest musicians and performers and the orchestrated chaos of sound and movement is genuinely impressive. Purportedly satirizing the musical and artistic avant-garde, while mocking the hipster urge to be alternative, New Cigarette somehow succeeds at celebrating both. While ridiculing them. While inhabiting the same space. It delivers the wisest of nonsense, formally as well as linguistically; and the tenderest of uproars, sonically as well as phonetically.

Applause is due to all concerned. Performers include Leah Schrager, Beth Griffith, Peter Schmitz, and the author himself, Kirk Wood Bromley. A roster of different visiting musicians are featured each performance and the evening I attended it was The Broadcloth Trio, who seamlessly entered the fracas. John Gideon is the punctilious sound master, and Bettina Warshaw the stage manager. It would be difficult to say, but I’m sure no one put a foot wrong.

A performance about performance which takes on the thick end of the avant-garde wedge, mocking while championing, at once lisping and orating, this sly serving of effrontery is an unusually sophisticated piece of theatre. Absolutely and unreservedly not for everyone, go, savor the disaffectation, and don’t forget your brain.

~~~

Smoke The New Cigarette
Inverse Kirk Wood Bromley

1h 30m
thenewcigarette.org
VENUE #13: Bowery Poetry Club
Sun 21 @ NOON Thu 25 @ 8:15

Related Posts:

• Elysian Fields (Fringe Festival 2011)
• Open Mic Night And Post-Irene PARTY!
• FringeNYC Announces 2011 Encore Series
• Top Drawer (Fringe Festival 2011)