>REVIEW
SHOW NO. 1: ARCHEOLOGY
Runs until November 11
Theatre Junction Resident Company of Artists
The GRAND (Theatre Junction)
Most of our early experiences with theatre begin in elementary school gymnasiums. Risers are set up along with an ersatz stage, a smattering of families fill the seats, and a few anxious faces peek out from behind the curtain. It’s only later, with these same amateur actors grown and the folding stage replaced by a multi-million-dollar theatre, that we’re asked to pay. It’s only once we’re asked to pay that we start asking for more than enthusiasm.
Audiences entering The GRAND for Show No. 1: Archaeology, the first show created by Theatre Junction’s resident company of artists, are greeted by company members in bare feet, milling about at the risers’ base – a palpably nostalgic reminder of anxious first productions, nervousness and all. Outside, in the cold, Peter Muller is busking with a guitar, while the audience inside watches a looped tape of the same. The stage itself provides an impressive sight, with the intertwining branches of Ami Farrow’s brilliant white set.
In artistic director Mark Lawes’s preamble, however, we begin to feel the first twinges that the performance might lack the professional cohesion of its production design. Like Moller’s drum kit behind the tangled shapes of Farrow’s set, we are told that the production sits under the barest of dressings – a performance whose "fragments" are to be interpreted by the audience.
Though the company’s decision to broadly interpret the theme of archeology is hardly surprising, the results seem to grasp the concept so loosely as to be incomprehensible. In its broadest reading, the theme is imagined simply as connotations of the word: "discovery" or "uncovering" – concepts essential to all performances. The resulting creation, then, is true to the theme of uncovering, in the sense of audience members scratching their heads raw trying to excavate the meaning we were assured their minds would find.
There are beautiful performances, certainly, that stand masterfully alone. Kris Demeanor proves that he is not only a sharp wit – his answer to the great existential question of why we are here is a musical lecture of the geologic forces that created oil – but a charismatic performer as well. Even his diatribe, "Where Are My Keys?" though virtually incomprehensible, has a delivery too intense to be ignored.
Where Demeanor provides the performance with an unforgettable auditory presence, dancers Anna Maria Krysiak and Wojciech Mochniej bring a physicality that is equally intense. With Moller, Krysiak is also able to produce a kind of wanton tribal sexuality. In a production of vagaries, the ambiguity and beauty of a skilled movement piece is a welcome diversion.
But because of the play’s structure, its successes can be quickly lost in the plodding in-between. Unlike their elementary selves, the company takes their creation with an undeserved earnestness that can only be found later in life.
"Lies I’ve Told" presents an interesting conceit as company members drop rocks into a bucket accompanied by telling a lie, but so what? It is a beginning without a middle and certainly no end, an unfinished work presented as though it were a completed product and not the "write a first line" exercise of a creative writing class. And though Moller concludes it with a self-conscious shrug (hopefully a cheeky nod to the "look at me" school of theatrical sensationalism), the striptease lead-up to the punchline takes all the time of the genuine, overwrought article.
"If we train our minds to be peaceful, we shall be happy," intones Shawna Burnett solemnly, adding sagely, "If we cannot train our minds to be peaceful, then we shall not be happy." At this point, the production cannot be accused of being an elementary school pageant – it has clearly descended into high school poetry.
The rest is largely a forgettable mix of the average or obtuse. Drinks are served.
Show No. 1 is a production without an anchor, a pageant in which director Lawes finds his actors wandering aimlessly about on stage. Six weeks were given for the production’s creation, six weeks of experimental performance creation with a completely new ensemble and an untested mandate. If the production leaves an archeological record, it says exactly that.
With four months before The Atlantis Project, the company’s second performance, we can only hope that the company retains its enthusiasm, adding the preparation and unity that Show No. 1 desperately needs. |
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