Cake In 15

A Thought on Torn Advertising Taken Far or Grand Adventures in a New Economy

It is good to have hope, that thing with feathers, as the poet said, and it’s best when it comes as a surprise. Biking down Nicollet back when summer seemed new and endless, before word came down that some Twin Cities cultural hubs were losing their spaces, it was good to see the reappearance of a certain flock of hopeful and forward looking birds, the quickly sketched but effortlessly floating marker work of Aaron Bickner and Andrew Shannon. The flying pigeons, black ink on the whitewashed panels of the building at the southeast corner of Nic & 10th first appeared last summer as part of the supposedly temporary Save Canvas show organized by Overproof, a show using empty retail spaces and found materials.

Even though a year has now passed, the installations in the abandoned retail spaces never were taken down but the shop tableaux were never my favorite part of the project. The birds were just so much more immediate, offering up a simple vision of how to use urban, publicly visible space (a legal and philosophical distinction from public space) in a way that makes the city more livable. This winter, the wall was covered up by a bright-hued ad campaign to visit Montana, wisely chosen to show the verdant mountains and crystalline lakes of Montana in summer, because in winter, Montana makes International Falls look like sunny South Beach. The color, in winter, was a nice mental getaway, but that’s all it was- escapism. The birds were put there by people, artists and organizers and entrepreneurs who live in this city and care about it.

It was the right positioning, too- the building once was the physical home of Let It Be Records, now a mail-order entity and still has the advertising for the failed 10th & Nicollet luxury highrise that followed adorning the top of the window canopies. That corner, for the better part of the decade has stood for collapse and failure, a downtown reminder of the decline of independent retailers, the folly of inflated real estate markets and the ensuing recession. Save Canvas, it felt, was a defiant bird flipped to hard times. When we go broke, when the state of affairs, to cop Dessa’s verse from Low light/Low life, feels like “the flight of the salesman, the death of the bumblebee, nothing left for the attorneys and the tumbleweeds”, when the For Lease signs start becoming more apparent and longer lasting, it is good to have artists move in and take the chance.

Tonight was the last night for the Art of This space on South Nicollet, a space that has hosted a lot of adventuring and risk-taking over the last five years. As the excellently ambient and passionateTake Acre played the last installment of the Tuesday Night Music series in that space, David Petersen, director of the gallery, looked in from outside. He didn’t seem too worried- the music series is moving over to the Open Eye Figure Theatre and hopefully they can get some grant funding to help keep it running, but they have a good deal going for now. The space won’t sit empty- Jake Luck of Leisure Birds and GAYNGS is opening Yeti Records in the storefront on October 16th. A new salon, Honeycomb, has opened next door and word is that Kim Bartmann of Bryant-Lake Bowl, Barbette and the Red Stag has purchased Casey’s, the dive bar on the block. “What would we do here?” Petersen smiled, “We wouldn’t even fit in. We’d be the black sheep.” Plus, now he gets to make his own art, which is ultimately what artists should do, even if running the gallery has been it’s own form of sculptural installation. Not having a space is suddenly freeing again.

The Los Angeles Times Culture Monster blog also ran a story earlier in the year about the non-profit arts entities making big moves in L.A. Alexandra Grant, a member of the board of the Watts House Project had a quote that brings out the best of the times we live in. She said, “It’s such an exciting time for nonprofits. There’s an opportunity to think of these legal entities as a very creative space for people to organize. To think about the relationship between money and creativity and how they’re applied, and how a small nonprofit that’s on the ground can rethink some of the bigger, slow moving boats of culture.” In other words, let’s be birds in flight and not mud-stuck hippos. Local projects like Works Progress, Minneapolis Art on Wheels and even projects of the “slow moving boats of culture” like the Walker Art Center’s Open Field project show a collaborative, survivalist and innovative bent. Joseph Belk, who helped organize Save Canvas, teamed up with printers Burlesque of North America to launch CO Exhibitions. The Art Shanty Project may taking 2011 off, but if it is to better re-organize and re-energize it’s audience, it is for the right reasons. Bedlam Theatre may be losing it’s beloved brick-and-mortar space, but it is fighting on. In fact, they just announced they have a temporary new space to move into, so be there this Friday to blow it all out. Flocking together is what it is about.

Walking back down in the cool summer dusk when the birds first re-appeared on Nicollet, two kids, barely teenagers, had taken over the corner with a fuzzy boombox and, apropos of nothing and a box for tips, were voguing their hearts out to Gaga as bikers rolled past laughing. That’s the feel a city needs to survive- that we can own it’s private and publicly visible spaces, that artists are a critical part of a city’s well-being (a point well-made by MNPlaylist.org’s Alan Berks in blog post titled “I Want Something More Than Money From Minneapolis”) and that life here matters. We all want something more and if we can be fearless enough to street-corner dance, to move our arts organization into the homeless unknown, to risk a new record store, we can have what we want and more. Like it said inside the front door of Art of This, a quote from the poet that is Kermit the Frog, “You are not going to watch the show, you are going to be in the show.” So join in and fly right.

Knockout On All Floors or Now I Wanna Be Your Dog & Other Immigrant Tales

“I would have killed you if you had done the same thing in the third scene as in the first two,” I told Jeremey Catterton, actor, director and producer, as he stood sweating in his boxing shorts after the preview performance of The Polish Pugilist. “I know,” he beamed, “it’s all payoff, big beautiful payoff.” It is, The Polish Pugilist is all about the payoff, which is surprisingly traditional given the experimental work that Catterton produces. It doesn’t feel all that traditional though; described as a “postdramatic performance triptych”, the first scenes take you through a Polish immigrant’s gritty life in turn of the century Chicago while the final scene is the payoff centerpiece, to take the art metaphor further, a gloriously physical rendition of George Bellows’ Stag at Sharkey’s flanked by those miserable scenarios straight out of Ben Shahn.

The Polish Pugilist uses a text culled from the storyline of Upton Sinclair’expose of the meatpacking industry, The Jungle, the first Rocky movie, a never-ending list of Polack jokes and Catterton’s own poetry, all mixed together in order to create the “postdramatic” sense of the production- that there are multiple stories that comment on eachother. The stories may comment on eachother almost too well, despite Catterton and his able collaborators switching between accents to indicate which reference source is being enacted, there is a emergent narrative is familiar. Catterton as Leshak Shapanski emigrates from Poland to the United States to be with his family, Claire Monesterio and Abbie Williams, who portrays his wife Oona. Musician Jacob Grun (Me & My Arrow) plays George O’Connell, boss, boxing promoter and all-around archetypal bad guy while Mike Rylander takes on the role of the champion boxer, “The Truth”. They work together to tell this immigrant’s tale of privation, strife, indignity and injustice (one, which Catterton pointed out in the talk-back afterwards, is still a relevant theme if you change languages and skin colors) across three different floors of the performance space.

The “Coming to America” tale isn’t so straightforwardly told and general linearity doesn’t mean that there isn’t lots of charachter-shifting and aside moments, cues for song-and-dance scenarios taken from Rocky- “Why do you do this? Because I can’t sing or dance.”- and a barrage of Polack jokes that become more and more painful to both the cast and audience as they are nonchalantly flung, stand up comedy-style, about stage. These may be recognizable elements, but what is “post-“ about them is their undifferentiated and fluid sources- everyone tells Polack jokes, even the actors playing Polish characters, actors break into personal narratives, because in a Catterton production, there are not just actors playing characters, but actors playing themselves as actors playing characters. It is a shift that forces the personal to become at the disposal to the characters in the narrative and when used conscientiously as it is here, is a powerful boost to the authentic experience of theatre. Thus, Rylander’s broad but keen humor and larger-than-life delivery is critical to “The Truth”, Grun playing guitar in the production is no surprise, but that his parents are Czech immigrants and his mother a psychologist who wants to write a book titled “I’m an Immigrant, Not an Idiot” have a direct bearing on the presentation at hand.

The best reasons to go to The Polish Pugilist are those small details that add up to bigger ideas, the slapstick moments that carry deeper implications. The best challenge is the presence of Paula MacDonald, American Sign Language interpreter who is present and signing throughout the play. Her presence becomes increasingly insistent and at the points when you feel like you really must know what she is signing in order to carry on, unless you know ASL of course, you will be lost. That feeling of a lack of accessibility is crucial to the context of the immigrant experience and a powerful way of communicating that. It is, in a way, amazing what a simple presence can do to shape a story, but if there is anything to be taken from being in the audience of The Polish Pugilist, from the characters, from the actors portraying the characters of The Polish Pugilist, it is that we all show up with what we have, and fight for what we need. Postdramatic as the performance may be, that fight is elemental.

The Polish Pugilist runs Thursday, Friday & Saturday this week and next, August 19-28 at 8pm. Standing tickets are $15, seated $25, with a special offer this Friday & Saturday, 2 standing tickets for $20. E-mail thepolishpugilist@gmail.com for more information, or check out the Facebook event.

Disclaimer: I was a member of the Lamb Lays with Lion company from 2007 until earlier this year, working with Catterton, who was Artistic Director. I also work on the Clapperclaw Festival of the Arts with Catterton and co-producer Kristina Perkins. If I didn’t like The Polish Pugilist, though, I would tell you. Jeremey knows that.

Casting Stones in a Glass Menagerie or My Heart Shrinks Three Sizes This Week
I have spent the last week blissfully not attending Fringe shows, ignoring crowing e-mails about glowing reviews and generally side-stepping the whole 10-day circus of bite-sized productions. I’ll say it, I’ve never particularly enjoyed Fringe and before the 2010 edition pulls up stakes and leaves us trying to drum up attention for our other productions, I thought I would throw my hat into the ring as the Twin Cities Fringe Grinch.

-If you are an actor in the Twin Cities, the most common and annoying question you’ll get from well-meaning friends and relatives is, “So have you done anything at the Guthrie yet?” It’s grating as hell and has us all smiling through gritted teeth. The equivalent question from people slightly versed in the theatre world is, “So what are you doing for Fringe?” If you aren’t already inclined to do a Fringe show, it’s an amplification of the inane questioning, and grinds my teeth down to an even finer powder. Even worse, I find myself asking it to make small talk. Usually I have some other excuse, “I start rehearsals for another show in a week,” (true) but it comes down to an exchange between myself and another actress on the Fourth of July- Me: “You doing anything for Fringe?” “No, I like my summer too much. You?” “No, I like my theatre too much.” “Right.”

-Fringe tickets are now $12 a pop, which means you are paying 20 cents a minute for your theatre-going experience. Granted it’s not a terrible ratio- For the highest ticket price for “Streetcar” at the Guthrie ($60) it breaks down to 33 cents a minute for the 3 hour duration, for the $20 ticket price of Kevin Kling’s “Folk and Heros” show at Open Eye Figure Theatre, you’re paying a similar $0.22 or thereabouts. An average $15 ticket at Bedlam for a 90 minute show breaks down to $0.17 a minute. The Fringe definitely isn’t “Wicked” numbers, but don’t kid yourself into thinking it’s a deal either. With so many choices and a wide range of quality, it’s like paying good money for mystery meat.

-Alright, explain this to me again- you want me to buy a button? Some little piece of kitsch that I have to spend extra money on just for the privilege of purchasing a ticket? Don’t be too upset if I tell you to shove it and point out the killing you’re making by charging $4 for a 30 cent throwaway souvenir.

-There are a lot of talented people in the Fringe, locals who I am friends with and people coming in from out of town. I have no intention of disparaging the work they put in to making their shows a reality and the courage it takes to get up on stage, and I support the venues used by Fringe year-round. Trouble is, the Fringe encourages lowest common denominator issues to pull in the biggest ticket sales and win the extra money-making sixth show. That’s why we get so many Shakespeare spoofs, melodramas, musical parodies, sexy capers and it’s a whole big winking farcical mess. Hell, Fringe shows parody Fringe shows. And if I go to one friend’s show, I feel obligated to go a lot of people’s shows and I just don’t know if I can stomach that and keep talking to people after.

-Finally, Fringe is like the Sam’s Club of theatre. It’s big and packaged and you get a discount if you buy in bulk.

Perhaps to exorcise all the evil juju that comes along with tearing down a revered musical institution, the Apple Store in Uptown has been hosting a series of national and local acts in their cavernous new space. It also (along with the ever-changing upgrades and new models released by the generally benign but often grouchy reign of Overlord Jobs) gives people a reason to go into the store to drum up business for multi-colored earbuds or rubber bouncy things designed to correct your hand for being a less then perfect antenna. (I kid, please don’t wipe my hard drive by remote.)

Dearling Physique at the Apple Store from CakeIn15 on Vimeo.

All that said, the Apple Store was a contextually weird place for electro-art-dance-insert-hyphen-modifier-here-act Dearling Physique. The architecture of brushed metal and video screens really suited the band well in terms of aesthetic, but for their performance on the 31st it was inescapable that they were performing in a store, which made it stranger than any dark club experience with the band. An in-store is generally a more nonchalant affair but you can’t do nonchalant with Dearling Physique. As the video shows, you go all out, never-surrender dedication to warping tropes of masculinity through theatrics and intense layers of dance, electronically altered guitars and rattling drums. A Dearling Physique show, regardless of whether or not it is in a well-lit retail environment in the middle of the day, is an event and an experience, and that’s what makes it great. You can get more of the event and experience tonight at Hell’s Kitchen as part of the kick-off for frontman Domino, who is heading off to Europe, and the official release of the video for “Sleep and the Heart”, featuring c.a.s. of CakeIn15 (Apple and shameless self-promotion seem to go pretty well together). It all goes down at 8 and is free, so go get your art on and pick up a dance move or two to face down a normative hegemonic system, or for when you’re waiting on the next available “genius”.

You can pretty much tempt me anywhere with the promise of free ice-cream, and that was a big reason for going to Milly & Tillie, now playing through August 7th at the Open Eye Figure Theatre. I mean, I risked being the creepy older guy at a kid’s show, but director Jason Ballweber (also Artistic Director of the always funny but generally more adult company Four Humors Theater) had put me at ease earlier. “It has been marketed as a “family friendly” show,” he wrote while inviting me to the show, “which it is but I think it is just fun all around. I equate it to an episode of Peewee’s Playhouse.”

Peewee’s Playhouse is a good comparison, as Liz Schachterle as Milly and Elise Langer as Tillie (last name of Silly, thank you very much) mix their PBS friendly themes (Imaginary bears! Making ice-cream! A picnic!) with the same manic energy, off the charts voices and rubber faces that Paul Rubens brought to his icon of childhood-in-adult-form. The two actresses, with Schachterle playing an endearing Amelia Bedelia-type and Langer a bit more Chaplin-esque off-the-wall are aided in their high-energy shenanigans by excellent sound design courtesy of Sean Healy and a terrific mix of lighting (by Michael Murnane) and shadow puppetry (courtesy of Schachterle) that turn the actual picnic scene into live-action cartoon.

As an adult, I laughed at loud not only at the physical humor but also to some of the references to famous clowns of the past, a silent bit with a rainstorm and and wind drew from Chaplin. The energy and excitement of the neighborhood kids, some of whom have not missed a performance was also infectious and amusing. One child, in a bit where Schachterle was miming fishing, screamed out “Baseball!” Baseball was the next mime. The kids were there for the ice-cream too, but they get the benefit of the joy of live performance. It’s a sight better then sitting inside and watching TV, whether you’re 5, 25 or 65.

The show is free, and runs in conjunction with the summer “Driveway Tour“, so check out the theatre in your neighborhood!

It’s The End Of The World As We Know It, (& I Feel Fine) or “Well? Shall we go?” “Yes, let’s go.” They do not move. Curtain.

“They could smell death,” she said as she rolled her cigarette between her fingers. “They smelled death and everyone started tipping big.” She was talking about the regulars of a restaurant that closed, but despite the best efforts of the sunshine and summer breeze, the darkness of the end of times weigh heavy on the crowd on the rooftop patio of the Bedlam Theatre. The Bedlam is about to be evicted and downstairs in the relative cool of the brick bar, another patron sighed, “It feels like the end of a golden age.” It might be, mainly because the old aphorism is true; you don’t know how good you’ve got it ‘til it’s gone. Or in this case, on the way out.

By now you should know the details. The Star Tribune broke the story last week that the Bedlam Theatre, which has occupied a former nightclub space on the West Bank for four years now, was given notice by their landlords that they would have to leave the space by September 7th. Sheila Regan at the Twin Cities Daily Planet expanded that narrative with an excellent history of the Bedlam and what it has meant to the West Bank as a community. Even though the Bedlam is about to lose a physical space, it won’t be going down without a wash of ink and lots of peoples two cents, because opinions and voices are two of the only things that artistic-types have going for us these day. Lord knows it’s not the money or the stable future.

First Bedlam performance, “No Sugar Cookies For Herbert”

It wasn’t originally supposed to feel permanent. Four years ago, Bedlam and it’s merry band of theatre-making, authority-thumbing, romping gypsies and vagabonds were similarly evicted from a basement space and amid much wailing and gnashing of teeth, were steered into an empty building that had seen a string of failed businesses. I remember getting off the lightrail one cold day, maybe in November, and seeing people with hammers going to work on the outside of the run-down red brick building. “Whatcha doing?” “Putting in a theatre.” “Cool.” The concept seemed really simple, just take over a space and make a theatre! It hasn’t been simple at all, but it has been thrilling and rewarding to watch innovation at work. They’ve even made Shakespeare work for them.

Six months after that first encounter, I was auditioning for the first of three of the Bedlam’s 10 Minute Community Play Festivals in which I would participate. That From that first festival, I met the people with whom I would be a part of an indie-rock opera called Idigaragua. We went on to form a company called Lamb Lays with Lion and perform more works at Bedlam. I have done one-off performances there, designed for the space and written reviews of numerous shows that have been performed there. I loved a lot of it, hated some, but was rarely indifferent to what was happening in that space. I owe a lot to the Bedlam company. As it turned from just a theatre into one of the best bar & restaurant combos in town, I have had discussions, fights and feel-good sessions, been uproariously drunk and keenly sober there. Of any space in the Twin Cities, it is one where you can walk in and feel at home, whether you want to sit by yourself or get into it with a stranger. It has character, and it has community.

Bedlam’s fuzzy joyful memories

In fact, Bedlam has been central to creating a “community” on the West Bank. It sometimes feels like a neighborhood where students glide past hipsters ignoring the Somali immigrant population, all parties willfully oblivious to eachother. The Bedlam, especially through its work with the youth at the Brian Coyle Center, has made the space to change that and to bring these groups into dialogue. Bedlam has translated a fundamental tenet of theatre, that communication of personal narrative is a social force, and empowered communities and tribes in need of a voice. Fortunately this progress will not be lost, as the Mixed Blood Theatre just down the street (who own their building lock & stock) will be carrying on that community and youth based work. It only makes sense, as their stated mission is to be “dedicated to the spirit of Dr. King’s dream.”

Despite that continuation, it would be a great loss to the neighborhood, to theatre-folk, to artists, musicians and foodies, to passersby and to Minneapolis as a whole if these instigators and rabble-rousers go. Permanence may be antithetical to the revolutionary spirit, but Bedlam never let itself get bored in their space, and never bored us either. So let the mayor know that. Tell him that whether it’s through tax-breaks, real-estate incentives or good old fashioned politicking, Minneapolis needs the Bedlam’s innovative force. We should not let this go quietly, without a fight or at least a damn good party. Down in the bar, a board member was taking a distinctly different view then that of the end of days. “The moment they say so,” she grinned, “I’m ready to start a capital campaign.” She was ready to go, so let’s tip big, kick up our heels and move on to the next big change.

Spread the word! Save the Bedlam!

2009 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Futurism, the Italian avant-garde movement dedicated to breaking brutally away from the past and into a high-speed mechanical and industrial future. 2010 makes it 85 years since Sergei Eisenstein, the visionary Russian film director, released The Battleship Potemkin, a work that revolutionized film by the use of montage and served as fantastic propaganda for the newly installed Bolshevik state. It is not necessary to know things like this while sitting in the audience for Theatre Novi Most’s production of M2: Mayakovsky & Marinetti, now at the Open Eye Figure Theatre, but it does help to inform a clear vision through the furious and flickering layers of text and action on stage.

M2, as director Lisa Channer points out at the beginning of the play, is a fiction, but it is a historical fiction. Vladimir Mayakovsky (Vladimir Rovinsky, who also wrote and co-directed the play) was a Russian Bolshevik, born in 1893 who became a poet whilst doing hard time in Moscow’s Butyrki Prison. Filippo T. Marinetti (Stephen Pearce) was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1876 and was well-educated and worked in literary circles before publishing the “Manifeste de Futurisme” in Paris’ Le Figaro newspaper on February 20th, 1909. The two men only met once, in 1914, and there is no record of that meeting, so the scenario of M2, with Mayakovsky and Marinetti bouncing ideas off eachother, acting as provocateurs and fighting over a woman (Lilya Brik, played lithely and sensually by Julianna Drajko) is an imaginary conceit. These were two important artistic figures of the early 20th century though, and they were both caught up in the major political movements of their time, Bolshevism in Russia and Fascism in Italy, and so their stories are well worth exploring at a time when we more quietly and subtly are engaged in warfare and technological advancement.

What is most impressive about M2 is how Theatre Novi Most captures the kinetic and chaotic time period with full blooded, impeccably constructed performances. Rovinsky and Pearce form a spinning dynamo, pushing eachother louder, faster and more avant-garde in English, Russian and French, as poetry snippets and selections from Eisenstein flicker around them. They embody the deadly earnest faith in the machine future, that everything is better that is faster, stronger and more precise. They push their every masculine instinct to the fore- desire for newness, war, lust all comes up with a heaving sense of potential and seduction. With a cast rounded out by Billy Mullaney and Sasha Gibbs, two talented U of M undergrads and exceptional sound design by Daniel Dukich that heightens the explosiveness of every scene, M2’s ambitiously kinetic conceit may not always by conceptually clear, but it is compelling to see.

“Charge of the Lancers”, Umberto Boccioni 1882-1992

As the delirious actions of the first half of the play come crashing into the realities of the First World War and the Futurist beliefs, the ahistorical flurry of activity and imaginary construct is generally abandoned in favor of a more direct telling of Mayakovsky’s increasingly depressed life as a poet apparatchik in the new Bolshevik regime. In 1915 Marinetti published a book of poems titled “War Is The Only Hygiene Of The World”, and the program notes remark of the Futurists desire for warfare and “scorn for women” that, “Politically, it’s hard to reconcile them with our notions of art and poetry.” This is true, that decline of the avant-garde into functionary roles and acceptance of totalitarian regimes is a cautionary tale, told by Mayakosky, even if earlier he and Marinetti were a seductive vision. Both writers were dismissed by their leaders, with a particularly caustic quote from Lenin appearing on the screen calling Mayakovsky only fit for eccentrics, but the truly disturbing end is how complicit both men were in their own fate, and how the blinkered view of the future can easily be dominated.

M2 is an impressive piece of work from the new company, Theatre Novi Most, even if with all the action happening, it could be textually impenetrable at times. It sets up expectations for their next project, Old Story, a telling of the Gilgamesh myth at The Southern Theatre September 24-October 3. With many of the same performers as well as local luminaries like Barbara Berlovitz and Vanessa Voskuil on stage and a text by Kira Obolensky, if they can maintain the dynamism and focus of M2, Old Story should rock the ancient world.

Last performances Saturday 5/22/2010 at 8pm and Sunday 5/23/2010 at 2pm at Open Eye Figure Theater.

America, Home of the Camel Clutch or Action Figures With Multiple Points of Articulation
This is more of a “notes on” than a full review of Kristoffer Diaz’s Pulitzer short-listed The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity at Mixed Blood Theatre, as the show closes this weekend, and so I doubt that this will sway anyone either way. Plus, I am going to have spoilers throughout, because I don’t think I can talk about the final impact of the play without talking about the ending, and I don’t really feel like going over the particulars of the plot.

Here are some things you should know right off the bat. It’s a play about wrestling and wrestling is scripted entertainment and not sport, so wrestling and theatre go pretty well hand in hand. Gerardo Rodriguez, playing the wrestler Macedonio Guerra, known in the ring as Mace, is an engaging and personable narrator. His opening monologue about being 11 and watching wrestling while eating “generic flakes of corn with generic spoonfuls of sugar” in his underwear is a well constructed poignancy of bootstraps success. That sharply written backstory fuels his love of his job, even though he is the little guy going nowhere fast- he’s a good wrestler who puts up with all sorts of injustices and slights to stay in the community he loves. His mantra, whenever Everett K. Olson, owner of “The Wrestling” (Edwin Strout, in full blustering American businessman mode) goes off on some exploitative misguided tangent, is “I don’t mention it.” It’s a refrain that builds up to the final scenes and given the capitulation that occurs in the last scene, feels like it should be the theme for the show.

Ansa Akeya, playing the titular wrestler, is a built dude who looks good wearing gold lamé underpants and spends the show chewing up the scenery. Seriously, slavering and sweating and drooling all over the set, and he’s pretty funny. Billy Blaze, an actual wrestler who plays several minor characters including All-American heroes like “Billy Heartland” and “Ol’ Glory” is really sweet and genuine, especially as he’s a guy who has actually dealt with the feeling of community that binds Mace to his job. Rounding out the cast is Shalin Agarwal as Vigneshwar Paduar, known as VP, a Brooklynite whose family hails from India, multi-lingual lothario who gets talked into being a wrestler by Mace, who sees VP’s sales skills as his ticket to something bigger. Unfortunately, that something bigger is a full-blown orgy of stereotyping casting Macedonio and VP as anti-American arch-nemeses Che Chavez Castro (from my mouth and Mace’s, “Seriously?”) and the supposedly Middle Eastern fighter, The Fundamentalist.

Lots of cultural stereotyping gets flung around the stage, most of it played for comic effect and that’s one of the things that feels off. All the actors seem to be having a good time with their parts; the irony doesn’t carry. At one point Mace is trying to justify taking on the business of The Wrestling by playing off the stereotypes and he talks contemptuously about a line in the sand for Chad Deity to cross. It’s enough to make you wish that some of the contempt had been aimed at stereotyping itself, instead of feeling goofy. Chad Deity draws a line in the sand that Chad Deity does not cross.

It should shock more, but it doesn’t feel like a revelation. Watching Chad Deity I didn’t feel like I was being told anything new. Marketers manipulate history and play on nationalistic tendencies in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator and turn a profit? They sure do. People go along with that in order to be a part of that profit-turning? You bet. So where is, as the Chicago Tribune put it, the “visceral take-down of the way American marketers manipulate our jingoistic tendencies, a hilariously savvy exploration of racial and class-based stereotyping”? What I saw on stage was essentially an exploded caricature, which is not the same as a satire or a skewering. As Mace points out several times, the vaguely Middle Eastern arch-enemy has been done before, the Iron Sheik of 80s fame. Rohan Preston mentioned in his review that he was disappointed that there was no examination of the stereotype of the black violent athlete, and none of these things get really explored- the stereotypes are just thrown up against eachother at the insistence of Everett K Olson (a.k.a. EKO) and with the willing participation of VP and Mace.

Also troubling, is that the writing itself becomes looser and sketchier as the show progresses. Lines ranged from pandering (“The Fundamentalist hates Joe Mauer!”) to large social and international issues boiled down to tossed off lines (“BRIC! Brazil, Russia, India, China! Read Fareed Zakaria!”). When Mace finally confronts EKO and Deity over his building concerns, the scene is a well-choreographed wrestling scene, a physical burst, but the writing is a litany of “And I mention…” over and over again, which some traditional part of me wants to be more fully fleshed out in words. Mace has been telling us these things all along, now say them to EKO, already. The scene owes a lot to a film montage and voiceover, which is visually impressive but still felt hollow.

More troubling, is EKO’s response- that they should just sell that passion and love of the sport. So they do, and then Mace loses in the ring to Chad Deity to maintain the business franchise. All of which strikes me as a terribly disheartening capitulation- is Diaz saying that if you truly believe in something, you should continue to prostrate it in front of the existing powers? As VP watches on TV, the girl he is watching with asks why they are “cheering the bad guy,” referring to Deity, but this is too subtle a point to end on for a play that is about and has been such an overly bombastic spectacle.

It’s also hard not to think of Mickey Rourke and The Wrestler while watching Chad Deity. Rourke’s Randy “The Ram” is also a man with a love and respect for the work, for the community which makes people depend on each other and gives the audience the thrill of connection. Darren Aronofsky does something more visceral though with The Ram- whereas Mace tosses of the line that there will never be real conflict in American wrestling because “America can’t appear to be vulnerable”, The Ram shows a country already in decline, held together by that same desire for community that drives Mace but through The Ram, is brutally aware of it and his limitations. Diaz is trying to push the edges of our tolerance of stereotyping and what we’ll accept, but sitting in the audience at Mixed Blood, it didn’t feel like being all that different from being in the crowd at an arena, unquestioningly cheering on Hulk Hogan against the Iron Sheik.

At Least There Was a Meal or I Got To Be a Train!

Live Action Set's Noah Bremer. Photo by Eric Melzer.

Live Action Set Artistic Director Noah Bremer kicked off the show sitting in the mostly bare space of the Bedlam mainstage in comically ill-fitting suit petting a large cottonball sheep, nervously talking about waiting for a sign. He has been chosen “by the gods” to wait for a sign before the beginning of the “ritual” of the Happy Show. This talk is essentially a red herring to get to a full cast introduction and song-and-dance opening and send people out to the various locations of the sketches. In the intro, Bremer had quipped that they “had done the math” and that it was impossible to see every option that the show had to offer so that there is no way I can report on the full show. Since I had chosen a red juice token when purchasing my ticket, I got to go off to a room where Bremer and Noah Coon, a gregarious blond boy of about 10 or so told us an excitable story of being treasure hunters searching for the Key to Happiness at the behest of the City of Minneapolis, which was pretty much like asking a hyper child to recount the plots of the Indiana Jones and Tomb Raider movies with some Tom Swift thrown in for good measure. In another part of the theatre, there were cheers from the beer or wine token crowd and after the story, I played a game pretending to be a train. Did I mention that we were all wearing animal headdresses by this point? We were.

After the first round of sketches, we were brought back in to the mainstage for a meal from the excellent Bedlam kitchen, pulled pork or tempeh sandwiches, chips and pickles with a free drink from the bar with your token, which just about makes up the cost of the $15 ticket. At this point, I am glad I hooked back up with a friend who had received instructions as to what to do next, as I was feeling a little lost in the shuffle as the atmosphere was more of disorganized improvisation than chaotic revelry. The masks were late in being handed out, tech elements didn’t work as planned, there was stalling and some foot-shuffling and waiting, hopefully all of which are first show difficulties that can be fixed, but it all undercut the easy flow that is necessary for a show based around a promenade to work. Trying to get from set piece to set piece, all calculated to extract carefree happiness began to feel more like a task than a joy.

For me and my companions, a James Bond parody piece of playacting ensued, including little paper cutouts and sock puppets, and then I caught a red nose clown bit from Happy Show principal Diogo Lopes, amusing mostly because of the steady stream of Portuguese that heightened the absurdity. The ending with Bremer being judged by “the gods” is again, cute, and well choreographed and I won’t tell you what it is, but it is also set, for the most part, behind a large black screen hiding the actors for the most part. Stepping out into the lobby after the curtain call, reactions ranged from “I feel like all the unhappiness has been squeezed out of me,” to “Did it make you happy? Passably.” I left disappointed, not so happy, feeling like I had seen some gifted people spread out over an extended talent show or Punch-and-Judy pantomime. Should you go? Sure. It will make the actors happy.

End note: Bremer, Underbakke and Happy Show principal Brant Miller are leading a workshop on trateaux performance May 10 from 5-9pm. The cost is $25 before May 7, $30 after. These are some talented folks, so get something good out of it.

Gregor Samsa Died For Your Sins and Other Marxist Fairy Tales or Small Stages for Big Acts

In the Director’s Notes for Frank Theatre’s Metamorphosis, Frank Artistic Director Wendy Knox writes that “…the process has been a giant potluck, and everyone has made fantastic contributions to the meal,” which has a air of “From each according to their ability…” wafting sweetly from it. It’s a good model for collaborative and innovative theatre. When Frank Theatre was unable to secure the rights to a recent and acclaimed London adaptation of Kafka’s famous tale about a man turned into a “monstrous vermin”, Frank forged ahead and made their own, which turned out to be a great thing, given the abundance of talent in the mix at the Open Eye Figure Theatre when I went on Monday. Acting both as the characters and chorus, the five actors unfold the action of Kafka’s chillingly strange tale in an enthralling fantasy pantomime, exaggerated fingers and postures and gestures creating a universe where real emotion and pathos still exists.

Credit first and foremost must go to John Catron as the stricken Gregor Samsa. He spends most of the 85 minute running time crouched or contorted to convey the physical change afflicting him, and with his fingertips resting on the ground and leading the way as he scuttles about and swings from the rafters of John Beuche’s innovative set, the transformation is complete without elaborate costume tricks. This frees Catron to unleash his most formidable tool, a deep, caring and earnest face which makes Gregor such a pitiable character. Gregor’s greatest fault is his unquestioning devotion to his family, his willingness to suffer under a demanding boss, breaking his back in an attempt to bring his family out of debt. As the opening litany of woes is unfolds, the correlation of causation is hard to avoid: work unquestioningly and you are bound to become a beast, even if it is because of the best of intentions.

The family, with recent City Pages Best of the Twin Cities Best Actor winner Patrick Bailey as Father, Frank veteran Maria Asp as Mother and Tessa Flynn as the little sister Grete, tries to take this transformation in stride, but the horror is imaginatively conveyed through slow motion, exaggerated facial expressions and gestures, all part a shared vernacular developed by the cast that makes the production so engaging. Instead of fake crying, the women run their fingers down their faces in a gesture that is as theatrically aware as it is telling about the fraught relationship between Grete and Mother. Both feel protective of Gregor, and their competing desires to be the one in charge of his care brings out a nasty competitive streak that in some way, enables their own independence. Father reveals himself to be more capable and devious than previously thought by Gregor and Bailey well combines the gruff old man with his newfound spark for survival.

Rounding out the cast is Christopher Kehoe, who plays a number of different characters, from the evil Chief Clerk sent from the office to check on Gregor, who comes across little like Jim Carrey’s deceptive Count Olaf from the Lemony Snicket movie to the insipid charwoman who takes a shine to Gregor and, with the aid of a two-headed puppet, the three lodgers the Samsas take on to make ends meet, with obviously disastrous results. Kehoe’s range on full display and he makes the most of his tall frame to dominate the tiny Open Eye space when needed. Frank Theatre always manages to pull great talent (Shows like Mother Courage, Pillowman and Vinegar Tom come especially to mind) and Metamorphosis is a thrilling and intimate piece of ensemble acting and collaborative production. In the end, as the remaining Samsa family shows in the end, getting out and making work, being productive and feeling useful is good for society, and good for the soul.